The two proposed solution, as far as I understand it, to America's unemployment, and correct me if I am wrong, seems to be:

a) Stimulate the Economy by printing and throwing as much money as possible at the economy, and hope that, by increasing the amount of money avaliable, people will purchase, creating demand, and thus creating jobs to supply those demands. Because America is so patriotic that people only buy American, even when faced with cheaper Indian, Vietnamese, or Chinese products. This is the policy, I think, our judicious leaders have taken.

b) Let the market regulate itself, because workers will, when faced with unemployment, accept lower wages, and companies will hire them all, even if there is no demand for their product, and we are restored to that happy and blissful seat- in short, it is the best of all possible worlds, and everything lines to create the best of all possible endings.

What do you think is the right policy our nation should take in such a crisis as this?

A. would lead to inflation, last thing we need is for the price of meat to go from 5.99$ To 9.99$. this will force more people out of work....not fix anything. B. woulld be a better choice of the twobut there is better choices. 1 being the removal of most goverment programs the cost the tax payers... next would be to invest in companies that can make money through trade with other countries. As A scientist i will point out inclosed systems fail. the same goes for communities and governments.

Have you not heard of the magical Phillip's curve?

During the late fifties, British economist A.W. Phillips empirically stumbled upon an inverse relationship between unemployment and wages after plotting the figure on a graph. Economist soon realise that this relationship could be found everywhere, and soon, they connected that with inflation and a nifty explaination- as employment rise, the strenght of the labourers is greater, thus, they can raise wages. But the employers realising that this would make them less profit, would raise prices, and the workers, again, realising that this would in fact make their new gain in higher wages not really exist (if prices go up, and wage goes up in the same proportion, there is no gain) if this happens, so they go back to the table, &c. and soon, this will lead to inflation. Likewise, when there is unemployment, deflation occurs because, there being less workers, the workers are willing to work for lower wages, prices will drop, and deflation occurs. Thus, it falls to reason that there is a trade-off between inflation and employment- at least in the short term. The solution is then is to create short term inflation to stimulate the economy, create employment, &c. &c. By creating more money, the people would have more spending power, which will lead to greater purchase, and more demand. So, in effect, the government, in respect to their recent Stimulus and their printing of money, have giant lump of bronze, and they hope that it will seperate itself into copper and tin. Of course, I am no economist, and my explanation may be completely incorrect.

There's at least two problems with that "creating more money" process, when a fiat currency like the US Dollars is made of debt: one is the real physical limitation of our planet's carrying capacity simply cannot sustain an infinite growth.

These monetary learnings allow us to formulate two more extremely important Key Concepts.

The first is that all dollars are backed by debt. At the local bank level, all new money is loaned into existence. At the Federal Reserve level, money is simply manufactured out of thin air and then exchanged for interest-paying government debt. In both cases, the money is backed by debt. Debt that pays interest. From this Key Concept, we can formulate a truly profound statement, which is that at a minimum, each year enough new money must be loaned into existence to cover the interest payments on all of the past outstanding debt.

If we flip this slightly, we can say that each year all the outstanding debt must compound by at least the rate of the interest on that debt. Each and every year it must grow by some percentage. Because our debt-based money system is growing by some percentage continually, it is an exponential system by its very design. A corollary of this is that the amount of debt in the system will always exceed the amount of money.

I am not going to cast judgment on this and say that it is good or it is bad. It simply is what it is. By understanding its design, though, you will be better equipped to understand that the potential range of future outcomes for our economy are not limitless, but rather bounded by the rules of the system.

All of which leads us to the fourth Key Concept, which is that perpetual expansion is a requirement of modern banking. In fact we can make a rule: Each year, new credit (loans) must be made that at least equal the amount of all the outstanding interest payments that year. Without a continuous expansion of the money supply, past debts would not be able to be serviced, and defaults would ripple through, and possibly destroy, the entire system. Defaults are the Achilles heel of a debt-based money system, which we saw in our local banking example in the previous chapter. Because of this, all the institutional and political forces in our society are geared towards avoiding this outcome.

So the banking system must continually expand – not necessarily because it is the right (or wrong) thing to do, but, rather, simply because that is how it was designed. It is a feature of the system, just like using gasoline is a feature of my car’s engine. I might wish and hope that my car would run on straw, but I’d be wasting my time, because that’s just not how it was designed.

By understanding the requirement for continual expansion, we will be in a better position to make informed decisions about what’s likely to transpire and take meaningful actions to enhance our prospects.

More philosophically, we might wonder about the long-term viability of a system that must expand exponentially but which exists on a spherical planet. The key question is, “Can our current money system somehow be modified to be stable, fair, and useful when it is not growing?”

So the question is this: What happens when a human-contrived money system that must expand, by its very design, runs headlong into the physical limits of a spherical planet?(citation)

And two is the historical destruction of the currency itself due to hyperinflation.

It is crucially important that a nation’s money supply is carefully managed, for if it is not, the monetary unit can be destroyed by inflation. In fact, there are over 3,800 past examples of paper currencies that no longer exist. There are numerous examples from the United States, which may have some collector value but no longer possess any monetary value. Of course, I could just as easily display beautiful but no longer functional examples from Argentina, Bolivia, and Columbia, and a hundred other places

How does a hyperinflationary destruction of a currency happen?

Here’s a relatively recent example that comes from Yugoslavia between the years 1988 and 1995. Pre-1990, the Yugoslavian dinar had measurable value: You could actually buy something with one. However, throughout the 1980’s, the Yugoslavian government ran a persistent budget deficit and printed money to make up the shortfall. By the early 1990’s, the government had used up all its own hard currency reserves, and they proceeded to loot the private accounts of citizens. In order to keep things moving along, successively larger bills had to be printed, finally culminating in this stunning example – a 500 billion dinar note. At its height, inflation in Yugoslavia was running at over 37% per day. This means prices were doubling every 48 hours or so.

Let me see if I can make that more concrete for you. Suppose that on January 1, 2007, you had a penny and could find something to purchase with it. At 37% per day inflation, by April 3, 2007 you’d need one of these – a billion dollar bill – to purchase the very same item. In reverse, if you’d had a billion dollars on January 1st stuffed in a suitcase, by April 3rd you’d have had a penny’s worth of purchasing power left.

Clearly, if you’d attempted to save money during this period of time, you’d have lost it all, so we can safely state that inflationary money regimes impose a penalty on savers. The opposite side of this is that inflationary money regimes promote spending and require that money be invested or speculated, so as to at least have the chance of keeping pace with inflation. Of course, investing and speculating involve risks, so we can broaden this statement to include the claim that inflationary monetary systems require the citizens living within them to subject their hard-earned savings to risk.

That is worth pondering for a minute or two.

Even more importantly, since history shows how common it is for currencies to be mismanaged, we need to keep a careful eye on the stewards of our money to make sure they are not being irresponsible by creating too much money out of thin air and thereby destroying our savings, culture, and institutions by the process of inflation.(citation)

That's why a fiat currency is doomed to fail by its very design. And now with electronic payment system, hyperinflation can run its course without relying on printing large bills.

Jacob Goldstein: Because now, if you think of most of the money that you have, or most of the money that I have, it's never currency. I get paid. That is just a direct deposit from NPR, from my employer, to my checking account. It's not like they give me a bunch of hundred dollar bills every week. And then, I pay my bills online. So currency even now is like old-fashioned. You don't have to touch money. You don't have to see it. It's just information.Money is just an abstract and arbitrary made-belief, there's no intrinsic value in a fiat currency we use in the modern world.

Ira Glass: Until this conversation it never occurred to me that money doesn't change hands when we pay our bills online or anything. Like I don't know why I never even stopped to think, right, at no point does the bank go and deliver like $100 to the phone company on my behalf. It really is just numbers going back and forth in the computer.

Jacob Goldstein: Yeah. Nothing happens in the physical world. I mean I guess, except electrical pulses I guess it would be flying back and forth between computers. The money doesn't really exist. Not only is there no gold. There aren't even bills for most of the money that exists. Most of the money that exists is just the idea. It's just the bank saying, yes, there is this much money in your account.(citation)

So in conclusion, Money is just an abstract and arbitrary made-belief, there's no intrinsic value in a fiat currency we use in the modern world. But we're all made to believe that it's somehow important.

The two proposed solution, as far as I understand it, to America's unemployment, and correct me if I am wrong, seems to be:

a) Stimulate the Economy by printing and throwing as much money as possible at the economy, and hope that, by increasing the amount of money avaliable, people will purchase, creating demand, and thus creating jobs to supply those demands. Because America is so patriotic that people only buy American, even when faced with cheaper Indian, Vietnamese, or Chinese products. This is the policy, I think, our judicious leaders have taken.

b) Let the market regulate itself, because workers will, when faced with unemployment, accept lower wages, and companies will hire them all, even if there is no demand for their product, and we are restored to that happy and blissful seat- in short, it is the best of all possible worlds, and everything lines to create the best of all possible endings.

What do you think is the right policy our nation should take in such a crisis as this?

If only people would just see through the entertainment buzz, without themselves being indoctrinated into believing that it's somehow a dirty word. Then hopefully they would realize for themselves that socialism is about establishing an egalitarian society.

So, you would rather us go back to the Gold Standard or to a Commidity Currency system instead of our current Fiat system? I am not quite sure that getting rid of the Fiat Currency, which is simply money which the Government insures is legal tender, would be all that beneficial, being that Gold back currency would deflate the dollar to the point where, while it is worth much more, it is less competitive than- say- every other Fiat currency in the world, that is, every other currency in the world. Let us say we go back to backing our money with Gold, say, at the Bretton-Woods' 35 dollar for every ounce, Gold is, as of today, worth at around 1800$. That would make a single of our hypothetical dollar worth around 50 of our current dollar, and a single hypothetical cent worth around fifty cents. And, because there is only a limited supply of Gold in our Goverment treasury, Money becomes even more scarce. I do not think that massive deflation is the way to go. We may as well go back to the Pound, divide that into crowns, half-crowns, shillings, sixpence, thrupence, tuppence, penny, ha'penny, fathings, half-farthings and, if that is not enough, quarter-farthings if we do.

No. Not when all money become a useless and arbitrary bartering system in a resource/energy(not monetary) based economy. It can't measure electricity by watts, food by nutritional facts, civilization by prosperity, health and wellness by freedom from diseases, human flourishing by humanity, nor sustainability by bio diversity. It's a cultural legacy of no intrinsic usefulness or value within the context of nature.

So, you want to get rid of money in general, and replace that with the redistribution of energy and resources? That would have to be on an international level, because countries, in general, do not produce all of the resources it needs. Who will be the one to decide the most efficient distribution? The government? Let us assume the government is in charge of all this, and that we elect the government, who is to say that we should be able to trust them? Or that there is someone more qualified to resdistribute weath than ourselves? But, say it works, and that there is a egality in the distribution, then how would the system cope with this human disire known as 'want'? For example, how would it cope with the 'I want this, and he has it'? Obviously, we can have a system where we make everyone into selfless caring people, either by trying to eliminate the greed they have through Fun-Camps and Friendly-Land, and then everyone will all be happy nice people who give what they have to someone else who wants it, and that person would carefully accept and will be able to do the same if given the chance, which bascially amounts to brainwashing, or we could barter our tangible resources, for example, fifty bushel of wheat and a door-nail, in exchange for other tangible resources, say Milton's Paradise Lost and Hustler's magazine issue 205. That depends on the existence of Reciprocated and Mutual desire, with both parties desiring what the other has, for example, I may want Milton and Hustler, but the other fellow may not want wheat or door nails. That is why we have money, because it eliminates the need of mutual and reciprocated desire for transaction, money, either commidity based or fiat based, has the property of being able to procure objects, and has the property of procuring object- that is, it is valid now, and can be valid in the future- though, that also depends on the confidence in the money's ability. Most Socialist, including the most famous, Charles Henry Marx (an anglicisation of his name, you may well note), have been wise enough to induce the utility of money within any economic system dependant the human emotion known as 'desire', that is, almost all economic system. Even at the most primitive level, desire is the core of all economic transaction. Then, if this problem does not exist, then there is the problem of how to get there. Do we go there immediately, and rush to where angels dare not tread, or do we arrive there in graduations.

Brainwashing? Well talk about your irony. When the fact is your false-positive superstition on mere "desire" as human nature, is but a naturalistic fallacy within the context of social psychology and neuroscience. When the fact is humans as social animals both desire and need the experience of belongingness, not mere material possession.

Belonging-ness as a Basic Need

Just as protein is needed in the diet for the health of the body, so belongingness is a basic need for the mind and soul. In the early years of the study of depth psychology, different innovators explored our “basic” motivations. Freud suggested sex and aggression as two key drives, Alfred Adler noted the seeking of the sense of superiority to counter inferiority feelings, and Jung noted a wide range of archetypal sources of motivation. Others also came up with their suggestions.

By the 1940s, though, child development research had considered another interesting disease that was prevalent again in orphanages, variously called "hospitalism," "anaclitic depression", or “marasmus," and describing the way some babies became sickly and often died! They traced this not to not being fed, but not being sufficiently cuddled, touched, played with! Other researchers supported the growing need for contact—and this in some ways was in contrast to a fashion in the child-rearing texts of the 1920s and 1930s to not pick up the crying child lest he be “spoiled.” (The success of the Doctor Spock books in the late 1940s was due to his challenging this anti-spoiling regiment. Benjamin Spock didn’t support “permissiveness” as his enemies accused, but simply not being harshly reserved.)

Psychoanalysts in the 1950s wove such research into revisions of theory, and while some stayed with Freud’s earlier “drive” theories, a fair number came to espouse what came to be called object relations theory. (This term refers to the object of a person’s love—and/or hate—, but many think of objects as inanimate, so the term is somewhat somewhat misleading; the theory itself seeks to highlight the intensity and depth of interpersonal relations.)

Much of object relations theory originally was based on observations about the interactions of infants and young children and their parents or caretakers, but what should be realized as that these early bonding experiences, with all their ups and downs, is only a small part of the richness of the dynamic! By age four to six, young children expand the scope of their worlds to include wider circles of friends, neighbors, and more abstract entities. Kids hear about and begin to root for the teams their parents root for, begin to relate to the family’s or communities myths about gods or spiritual entities, partake of ethnic identities, and feel patriotism and other sorts of loyalty. The term, belongingness, then, is more understandable and inclusive of our broader, more complex and life-long needs for feeling connected.(citation)

However, that human need for the experience of belongingness through social connection got highjacked by the psychotic corporate cultural practice of perception management from cradle to grave. AKA your "Fun-Camps" and "Friendly-Land" created by the corporations. When they basically socialized our children that in order for them to be worthy of belongingness, they need to possess their products, while compete in an arbitrary social hierarchy of vanity and shallowness.

Actually, I never said it is in man's nature to 'desire', but that desire, as in material desire, is the driving force of all economic transaction. Maybe there are people simply content with the satisfaction of 'Belonging'- whether to a community, a religion, a family, what ever, but, it is also true that some people have material want. It is not an illusion created by the corporations, material wants is what drove trade since the beginning of time, before the creation of corporations, before Capitalism, etc. But all this still avoids the question that I posit, how does your proposed system work? How does it overcome those limitations? How do we get to it? If it doesn't answer those question, it cannot work as an economic model.

The two proposed solution, as far as I understand it, to America's unemployment, and correct me if I am wrong, seems to be:

a) Stimulate the Economy by printing and throwing as much money as possible at the economy, and hope that, by increasing the amount of money avaliable, people will purchase, creating demand, and thus creating jobs to supply those demands. Because America is so patriotic that people only buy American, even when faced with cheaper Indian, Vietnamese, or Chinese products. This is the policy, I think, our judicious leaders have taken.

b) Let the market regulate itself, because workers will, when faced with unemployment, accept lower wages, and companies will hire them all, even if there is no demand for their product, and we are restored to that happy and blissful seat- in short, it is the best of all possible worlds, and everything lines to create the best of all possible endings.

What do you think is the right policy our nation should take in such a crisis as this?

A. would lead to inflation, last thing we need is for the price of meat to go from 5.99$ To 9.99$. this will force more people out of work....not fix anything. B. woulld be a better choice of the twobut there is better choices. 1 being the removal of most goverment programs the cost the tax payers... next would be to invest in companies that can make money through trade with other countries. As A scientist i will point out inclosed systems fail. the same goes for communities and governments.

Have you not heard of the magical Phillip's curve?

During the late fifties, British economist A.W. Phillips empirically stumbled upon an inverse relationship between unemployment and wages after plotting the figure on a graph. Economist soon realise that this relationship could be found everywhere, and soon, they connected that with inflation and a nifty explaination- as employment rise, the strenght of the labourers is greater, thus, they can raise wages. But the employers realising that this would make them less profit, would raise prices, and the workers, again, realising that this would in fact make their new gain in higher wages not really exist (if prices go up, and wage goes up in the same proportion, there is no gain) if this happens, so they go back to the table, &c. and soon, this will lead to inflation. Likewise, when there is unemployment, deflation occurs because, there being less workers, the workers are willing to work for lower wages, prices will drop, and deflation occurs. Thus, it falls to reason that there is a trade-off between inflation and employment- at least in the short term. The solution is then is to create short term inflation to stimulate the economy, create employment, &c. &c. By creating more money, the people would have more spending power, which will lead to greater purchase, and more demand. So, in effect, the government, in respect to their recent Stimulus and their printing of money, have giant lump of bronze, and they hope that it will seperate itself into copper and tin. Of course, I am no economist, and my explanation may be completely incorrect.

There's at least two problems with that "creating more money" process, when a fiat currency like the US Dollars is made of debt: one is the real physical limitation of our planet's carrying capacity simply cannot sustain an infinite growth.

These monetary learnings allow us to formulate two more extremely important Key Concepts.

The first is that all dollars are backed by debt. At the local bank level, all new money is loaned into existence. At the Federal Reserve level, money is simply manufactured out of thin air and then exchanged for interest-paying government debt. In both cases, the money is backed by debt. Debt that pays interest. From this Key Concept, we can formulate a truly profound statement, which is that at a minimum, each year enough new money must be loaned into existence to cover the interest payments on all of the past outstanding debt.

If we flip this slightly, we can say that each year all the outstanding debt must compound by at least the rate of the interest on that debt. Each and every year it must grow by some percentage. Because our debt-based money system is growing by some percentage continually, it is an exponential system by its very design. A corollary of this is that the amount of debt in the system will always exceed the amount of money.

I am not going to cast judgment on this and say that it is good or it is bad. It simply is what it is. By understanding its design, though, you will be better equipped to understand that the potential range of future outcomes for our economy are not limitless, but rather bounded by the rules of the system.

All of which leads us to the fourth Key Concept, which is that perpetual expansion is a requirement of modern banking. In fact we can make a rule: Each year, new credit (loans) must be made that at least equal the amount of all the outstanding interest payments that year. Without a continuous expansion of the money supply, past debts would not be able to be serviced, and defaults would ripple through, and possibly destroy, the entire system. Defaults are the Achilles heel of a debt-based money system, which we saw in our local banking example in the previous chapter. Because of this, all the institutional and political forces in our society are geared towards avoiding this outcome.

So the banking system must continually expand – not necessarily because it is the right (or wrong) thing to do, but, rather, simply because that is how it was designed. It is a feature of the system, just like using gasoline is a feature of my car’s engine. I might wish and hope that my car would run on straw, but I’d be wasting my time, because that’s just not how it was designed.

By understanding the requirement for continual expansion, we will be in a better position to make informed decisions about what’s likely to transpire and take meaningful actions to enhance our prospects.

More philosophically, we might wonder about the long-term viability of a system that must expand exponentially but which exists on a spherical planet. The key question is, “Can our current money system somehow be modified to be stable, fair, and useful when it is not growing?”

So the question is this: What happens when a human-contrived money system that must expand, by its very design, runs headlong into the physical limits of a spherical planet?(citation)

And two is the historical destruction of the currency itself due to hyperinflation.

It is crucially important that a nation’s money supply is carefully managed, for if it is not, the monetary unit can be destroyed by inflation. In fact, there are over 3,800 past examples of paper currencies that no longer exist. There are numerous examples from the United States, which may have some collector value but no longer possess any monetary value. Of course, I could just as easily display beautiful but no longer functional examples from Argentina, Bolivia, and Columbia, and a hundred other places

How does a hyperinflationary destruction of a currency happen?

Here’s a relatively recent example that comes from Yugoslavia between the years 1988 and 1995. Pre-1990, the Yugoslavian dinar had measurable value: You could actually buy something with one. However, throughout the 1980’s, the Yugoslavian government ran a persistent budget deficit and printed money to make up the shortfall. By the early 1990’s, the government had used up all its own hard currency reserves, and they proceeded to loot the private accounts of citizens. In order to keep things moving along, successively larger bills had to be printed, finally culminating in this stunning example – a 500 billion dinar note. At its height, inflation in Yugoslavia was running at over 37% per day. This means prices were doubling every 48 hours or so.

Let me see if I can make that more concrete for you. Suppose that on January 1, 2007, you had a penny and could find something to purchase with it. At 37% per day inflation, by April 3, 2007 you’d need one of these – a billion dollar bill – to purchase the very same item. In reverse, if you’d had a billion dollars on January 1st stuffed in a suitcase, by April 3rd you’d have had a penny’s worth of purchasing power left.

Clearly, if you’d attempted to save money during this period of time, you’d have lost it all, so we can safely state that inflationary money regimes impose a penalty on savers. The opposite side of this is that inflationary money regimes promote spending and require that money be invested or speculated, so as to at least have the chance of keeping pace with inflation. Of course, investing and speculating involve risks, so we can broaden this statement to include the claim that inflationary monetary systems require the citizens living within them to subject their hard-earned savings to risk.

That is worth pondering for a minute or two.

Even more importantly, since history shows how common it is for currencies to be mismanaged, we need to keep a careful eye on the stewards of our money to make sure they are not being irresponsible by creating too much money out of thin air and thereby destroying our savings, culture, and institutions by the process of inflation.(citation)

That's why a fiat currency is doomed to fail by its very design. And now with electronic payment system, hyperinflation can run its course without relying on printing large bills.

Jacob Goldstein: Because now, if you think of most of the money that you have, or most of the money that I have, it's never currency. I get paid. That is just a direct deposit from NPR, from my employer, to my checking account. It's not like they give me a bunch of hundred dollar bills every week. And then, I pay my bills online. So currency even now is like old-fashioned. You don't have to touch money. You don't have to see it. It's just information.Money is just an abstract and arbitrary made-belief, there's no intrinsic value in a fiat currency we use in the modern world.

Ira Glass: Until this conversation it never occurred to me that money doesn't change hands when we pay our bills online or anything. Like I don't know why I never even stopped to think, right, at no point does the bank go and deliver like $100 to the phone company on my behalf. It really is just numbers going back and forth in the computer.

Jacob Goldstein: Yeah. Nothing happens in the physical world. I mean I guess, except electrical pulses I guess it would be flying back and forth between computers. The money doesn't really exist. Not only is there no gold. There aren't even bills for most of the money that exists. Most of the money that exists is just the idea. It's just the bank saying, yes, there is this much money in your account.(citation)

So in conclusion, Money is just an abstract and arbitrary made-belief, there's no intrinsic value in a fiat currency we use in the modern world. But we're all made to believe that it's somehow important.

The two proposed solution, as far as I understand it, to America's unemployment, and correct me if I am wrong, seems to be:

a) Stimulate the Economy by printing and throwing as much money as possible at the economy, and hope that, by increasing the amount of money avaliable, people will purchase, creating demand, and thus creating jobs to supply those demands. Because America is so patriotic that people only buy American, even when faced with cheaper Indian, Vietnamese, or Chinese products. This is the policy, I think, our judicious leaders have taken.

b) Let the market regulate itself, because workers will, when faced with unemployment, accept lower wages, and companies will hire them all, even if there is no demand for their product, and we are restored to that happy and blissful seat- in short, it is the best of all possible worlds, and everything lines to create the best of all possible endings.

What do you think is the right policy our nation should take in such a crisis as this?

If only people would just see through the entertainment buzz, without themselves being indoctrinated into believing that it's somehow a dirty word. Then hopefully they would realize for themselves that socialism is about establishing an egalitarian society.

So, you would rather us go back to the Gold Standard or to a Commidity Currency system instead of our current Fiat system? I am not quite sure that getting rid of the Fiat Currency, which is simply money which the Government insures is legal tender, would be all that beneficial, being that Gold back currency would deflate the dollar to the point where, while it is worth much more, it is less competitive than- say- every other Fiat currency in the world, that is, every other currency in the world. Let us say we go back to backing our money with Gold, say, at the Bretton-Woods' 35 dollar for every ounce, Gold is, as of today, worth at around 1800$. That would make a single of our hypothetical dollar worth around 50 of our current dollar, and a single hypothetical cent worth around fifty cents. And, because there is only a limited supply of Gold in our Goverment treasury, Money becomes even more scarce. I do not think that massive deflation is the way to go. We may as well go back to the Pound, divide that into crowns, half-crowns, shillings, sixpence, thrupence, tuppence, penny, ha'penny, fathings, half-farthings and, if that is not enough, quarter-farthings if we do.

No. Not when all money become a useless and arbitrary bartering system in a resource/energy(not monetary) based economy. It can't measure electricity by watts, food by nutritional facts, civilization by prosperity, health and wellness by freedom from diseases, human flourishing by humanity, nor sustainability by bio diversity. It's a cultural legacy of no intrinsic usefulness or value within the context of nature.

So, you want to get rid of money in general, and replace that with the redistribution of energy and resources? That would have to be on an international level, because countries, in general, do not produce all of the resources it needs. Who will be the one to decide the most efficient distribution? The government? Let us assume the government is in charge of all this, and that we elect the government, who is to say that we should be able to trust them? Or that there is someone more qualified to resdistribute weath than ourselves? But, say it works, and that there is a egality in the distribution, then how would the system cope with this human disire known as 'want'? For example, how would it cope with the 'I want this, and he has it'? Obviously, we can have a system where we make everyone into selfless caring people, either by trying to eliminate the greed they have through Fun-Camps and Friendly-Land, and then everyone will all be happy nice people who give what they have to someone else who wants it, and that person would carefully accept and will be able to do the same if given the chance, which bascially amounts to brainwashing, or we could barter our tangible resources, for example, fifty bushel of wheat and a door-nail, in exchange for other tangible resources, say Milton's Paradise Lost and Hustler's magazine issue 205. That depends on the existence of Reciprocated and Mutual desire, with both parties desiring what the other has, for example, I may want Milton and Hustler, but the other fellow may not want wheat or door nails. That is why we have money, because it eliminates the need of mutual and reciprocated desire for transaction, money, either commidity based or fiat based, has the property of being able to procure objects, and has the property of procuring object- that is, it is valid now, and can be valid in the future- though, that also depends on the confidence in the money's ability. Most Socialist, including the most famous, Charles Henry Marx (an anglicisation of his name, you may well note), have been wise enough to induce the utility of money within any economic system dependant the human emotion known as 'desire', that is, almost all economic system. Even at the most primitive level, desire is the core of all economic transaction. Then, if this problem does not exist, then there is the problem of how to get there. Do we go there immediately, and rush to where angels dare not tread, or do we arrive there in graduations.

Brainwashing? Well talk about your irony. When the fact is your false-positive superstition on mere "desire" as human nature, is but a naturalistic fallacy within the context of social psychology and neuroscience. When the fact is humans as social animals both desire and need the experience of belongingness, not mere material possession.

Belonging-ness as a Basic Need

Just as protein is needed in the diet for the health of the body, so belongingness is a basic need for the mind and soul. In the early years of the study of depth psychology, different innovators explored our “basic” motivations. Freud suggested sex and aggression as two key drives, Alfred Adler noted the seeking of the sense of superiority to counter inferiority feelings, and Jung noted a wide range of archetypal sources of motivation. Others also came up with their suggestions.

By the 1940s, though, child development research had considered another interesting disease that was prevalent again in orphanages, variously called "hospitalism," "anaclitic depression", or “marasmus," and describing the way some babies became sickly and often died! They traced this not to not being fed, but not being sufficiently cuddled, touched, played with! Other researchers supported the growing need for contact—and this in some ways was in contrast to a fashion in the child-rearing texts of the 1920s and 1930s to not pick up the crying child lest he be “spoiled.” (The success of the Doctor Spock books in the late 1940s was due to his challenging this anti-spoiling regiment. Benjamin Spock didn’t support “permissiveness” as his enemies accused, but simply not being harshly reserved.)

Psychoanalysts in the 1950s wove such research into revisions of theory, and while some stayed with Freud’s earlier “drive” theories, a fair number came to espouse what came to be called object relations theory. (This term refers to the object of a person’s love—and/or hate—, but many think of objects as inanimate, so the term is somewhat somewhat misleading; the theory itself seeks to highlight the intensity and depth of interpersonal relations.)

Much of object relations theory originally was based on observations about the interactions of infants and young children and their parents or caretakers, but what should be realized as that these early bonding experiences, with all their ups and downs, is only a small part of the richness of the dynamic! By age four to six, young children expand the scope of their worlds to include wider circles of friends, neighbors, and more abstract entities. Kids hear about and begin to root for the teams their parents root for, begin to relate to the family’s or communities myths about gods or spiritual entities, partake of ethnic identities, and feel patriotism and other sorts of loyalty. The term, belongingness, then, is more understandable and inclusive of our broader, more complex and life-long needs for feeling connected.(citation)

However, that human need for the experience of belongingness through social connection got highjacked by the psychotic corporate cultural practice of perception management from cradle to grave. AKA your "Fun-Camps" and "Friendly-Land" created by the corporations. When they basically socialized our children that in order for them to be worthy of belongingness, they need to possess their products, while compete in an arbitrary social hierarchy of vanity and shallowness.

Actually, I never said it is in man's nature to 'desire', but that desire, as in material desire, is the driving force of all economic transaction. Maybe there are people simply content with the satisfaction of 'Belonging'- whether to a community, a religion, a family, what ever, but, it is also true that some people have material want. It is not an illusion created by the corporations, material wants is what drove trade since the beginning of time, before the creation of corporations, before Capitalism, etc. But all this still avoids the question that I posit, how does your proposed system work? How does it overcome those limitations? How do we get to it? If it doesn't answer those question, it cannot work as an economic model.

The psychological dark triad of a personality continuum for narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy does predate the creation of corporations, governments, and capitalism as systems of modern society. When these ideas as dangerous memes are only the manifestos of said evil personalities, which later on became their own cultural legacies and social processes for evil.

The common thread running through all three traits of The Dark Triad (Machiavellianism, subclinical narcissism, and subclinical psychopathy) is high selfishness and low disagreeableness. Still, the three traits are only moderately correlated with one another, and recently researchers have started to assess the independent predictions of each separately from the others, and how people with a different balance of the Dark Triad go about obtaining their goals differently. For instance, recent research conducted by Peter Jonason, Glenn Geher, and myself suggests that narcissism is tied most heavily to extroversion and a desire to engage in social interactions whereas psychopathy is negatively related to extroversion.

Also of particular note is how each member of The Dark Triad is differentially related to different forms of impulsivity. Scott J. Dickman differentiates between two different forms of impulsivity: functional impulsivity and dysfunctional impulsivity. Functional impulsivity is related to idea generation, enthusiasm, adventurousness, and the ability to make quick decisions. On the other hand, dysfunctional impulsivity is related to erratic disorderliness, distraction, and inaccurate decision making.

To see how each of the members of The Dark Triad is related to impulsivity, Daniel N. Jones and Delroy L. Paulhus recently administered a battery of Dark Triad and impulsivity tests to 142 undergraduates as well as 329 adults in the community. Their measure of Psychopathy included four components: erratic lifestyle (e.g., "I am a rebellious person"), interpersonal manipulation (e.g., "I would get a kick out of 'scamming' someone"), callous affect ("e.g., "Most people are wimps"), and antisocial behavior (e.g., "I have tricked someone into giving me money"). They found that all four components of Psychopathy were extremely highly related to one another. Their measure of Machiavellianism included items such as "Anyone who completely trusts anyone else is asking for trouble" and their measure of narcissism included items such as "I like to be the center of attention". Finally, their measure of functional impulsivity included items such as "Most of the time, I can put my thoughts into words very rapidly", whereas their measure of dysfunctional impulsivity included items such as "I often get into trouble because I do not think before I act."

Even though the inter-correlations among the members of the Dark Triad were higher in the community sample, they found a similar pattern of results for both the student and community sample. Both narcissistic and psychopathic individuals tended to show higher levels of overall impulsivity. More telling though were correlations with the different types of impulsivity. Psychopathy was primarily associated with dysfunctional impulsivity, whereas narcissism was primarily related to functional impulsivity. Interestingly, Machavellianism was unrelated to either type of impulsivity.

According to the researchers, these results help explain why narcissism is a mixed blessing. In situations where accuracy is less important than speedy responses (e.g., short-term social interactions), functional impulsivity will be adaptive for narcissists. Over time, though, even functional impulsivity will start to show detrimental effects on interpersonal relationships.

The link between psychopathy and dysfunctional impulsivity is consistent with other research showing that psychopaths lack the ability to inhibit their antisocial impulses. The lack of relation between impulsivity and Machiavellianism is interesting and the researchers suggest that Machiavellian individuals may have an advantage over psychopaths and narcissists because their moderate impulse control may allow them to "refrain from counterproductive behaviors despite their selfish intentions".

The researchers conclude,

"Taken together, our two studies add to the accumulating evidence that the Dark Triad members have unique personality styles favoring different life outcomes. Each member has a unique social engagement style that might prove adaptive in some situations but maladaptive in others."

By studying beautiful minds as well as not-so beautiful minds, I think we can come to a more nuanced and richer understanding of human nature and the various paths by which people obtain their goals.(citation)

And it's exactly through the moral neutral that is our cultural legacy, where we can master the social process of empathy and altruism, starting with an education reform. Which Sir Ken Robinson had explained rather well in his TED Talk called Changing education paradigms. That "the problem is they are trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past." While "on the way they are alienating millions of kids who don't see any purpose in going to school."

I believe we need our children to surpass ourselves as future leaders in a global community, which means we need to cultivate them within a cultural legacy of leadership based on "listen, learn, then lead".

And you have to watch and take care of each other. I probably learned the most about relationships. I learned they are the sinew which hold the force together. I grew up much of my career in the Ranger regiment. And every morning in the Ranger regiment, every Ranger -- and there are more than 2,000 of them -- says a six-stanza Ranger creed. You may know one line of it, it says, "I'll never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy." And it's not a mindless mantra, and it's not a poem. It's a promise. Every Ranger promises every other Ranger now matter what happens, no matter what it costs me, if you need me, I'm coming. And every Ranger gets that same promise from every other Ranger. Think about it. It's extraordinarily powerful. It's probably more powerful than marriage vows. And they've lived up to it, which gives it special power. And so the organizational relationship that bonds them is just amazing.

And I learned personal relationships were more important than ever. We were in a difficult operation in Afghanistan in 2007, and an old friend of mine, that I had spent many years at various points of my career with -- godfather to one of their kids -- he sent me a note, just in an envelope, that had a quote from Sherman to Grant that said, "I knew if I ever got in a tight spot, that you would come, if alive." And having that kind of relationship, for me, turned out to be critical at many points in my career.

And I learned that you have to give that in this environment, because it's tough. That was my journey. I hope it's not over. I came to believe that a leader isn't good because they're right; they're good because they're willing to learn and to trust. This isn't easy stuff. It's not like that electronic abs machine where, 15 minutes a month, you get washboard abs. And it isn't always fair. You can get knocked down, and it hurts and it leaves scars. But if you're a leader, the people you've counted on will help you up. And if you're a leader, the people who count on you need you on your feet.(citation)

That's not cultural legacy grounded in academics, but rather it's about ethics and empathy. Which is rightfully so considering the next revolutionary shift in learning global politics through complex, engaging, and dynamic "World Peace" game.

And so this World Peace Game I'd like to tell you about. It started out like this: it's just a four-foot by five-foot plywood board in an inner-city urban school, 1978. I was creating a lesson for students on Africa. We put all the problems of the world there, and I thought, let's let them solve it. I didn't want to lecture or have just book reading. I wanted to have them be immersed and learn the feeling of learning through their bodies. So I thought, well they like to play games. I'll make something -- I didn't say interactive. We didn't have that term in 1978 -- but something interactive. And so we made the game, and it has since evolved to a four-foot by four-foot by four-foot Plexiglass structure. And it has four Plexiglass layers.

There's an outer space layer with black holes and satellites and research satellites and asteroid mining. There's an air and space level with clouds that are big puffs of cotton we push around and territorial air spaces and air forces, a ground and sea level with thousands of game pieces on it -- even an undersea level with submarines and undersea mining. There are four countries around the board. The kids make up the names of the countries -- some are rich some are poor. They have different assets, commercial and military. And each country has a cabinet. There's a prime minister, secretary of state, minister of defense and a CFO, or comptroller. I choose the prime minister based on my relationship with them. I offer them the job, they can turn it down, and then they choose their own cabinet. There's a World Bank, arms dealers and a United Nations. There's also a weather goddess who controls a random stock market and random weather.

That's not all. And then there's a 13-page crisis document with 50 interlocking problems. So that, if one thing changes, everything else changes. I throw them into this complex matrix, and they trust me because we have a deep, rich relationship together. And so with all these crises, we have -- let's see -- ethnic and minority tensions; we have chemical and nuclear spills, nuclear proliferation. There's oil spills, environmental disasters, water rights disputes, breakaway republics, famine, endangered species and global warming. If Al Gore is here, I'm going to send my fourth-graders from Agnor-Hurt and Venable school to you because they solved global warming in a week. And they've done it several times too.

So I also have in the game a saboteur -- some child -- it's basically a troublemaker -- and I have my troublemaker put to use because they, on the surface, are trying to save the world and their position in the game. But they're also trying to undermine everything in the game. And they do it secretly through misinformation and ambiguities and irrelevancies, trying to cause everyone to think more deeply. The saboteur is there, and we also read from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War." Fourth-graders understand it -- nine years old -- and they handle that and use that to understand how to, not follow -- at first they do -- the paths to power and destruction, the path to war. They learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking, to think in a long-term, more consequential way.(citation)

So that's one example of how to cultivate ethics and empathy within children through self-guided social gaming. But what about academic learning that's insofar had always been done in a dehumanizing, individualistic, and atomized environment? Well one Salman Khan has an interesting and innovative alternative in his TED Talk called Let's use video to reinvent education.

The other thing that happened -- and even at this point, I said, "Okay, maybe it's a good supplement. It's good for motivated students. It's good for maybe home schoolers." But I didn't think it would be something that would somehow penetrate the classroom. But then I started getting letters from teachers. And the teachers would write, saying, "We use your videos to flip the classroom. You've given the lectures, so now what we do ... " and this could happen in every classroom in America tomorrow, " ... what I do is I assign the lectures for homework. And what used to be homework, I now have the students doing in the classroom."

And I want to pause here for a second, because there's a couple of interesting things. One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit -- the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did. They can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. But the more interesting thing is -- and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom -- by removing the one size fits all lecture from the classroom and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, and then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom. They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience -- 30 kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other. A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one size fits all lecture to 30 students -- blank faces, slightly antagonistic -- and now it's a human experience. Now they're actually interacting with each other.

So once the Khan Academy -- I quit my job and we turned into a real organization -- we're a not-for-profit -- the question is, how do we take this to the next level? How do we take what those teachers are doing to their natural conclusion? And so what I'm showing you over here, these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins. The ones I started were much more primitive. This is a more competent version of it. But the paradigm here is, we'll generate as many questions as you need until you get that concept, until you get 10 in a row. And the Khan Academy videos are there. You get hints, the actual steps for that problem, if you don't know how to do it. But the paradigm here, it seems like a very simple thing: 10 in a row, you move on. But it's fundamentally different than what's happening in classrooms right now.

In a traditional classroom, you have a couple of homework, homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. And that exam, whether you get a 70 percent, an 80 percent, a 90 percent, or a 95 percent, the class moves on to the next topic. And even that 95 percent student, what was the five percent they didn't know? Maybe they didn't know what happens when you raise something to the zero power. And then you go build on that in the next concept. That's analogous to imagine learning to ride a bicycle, and maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time, and I give you that bicycle for two weeks. And then I come back after two weeks, and I say, "Well, let's see. You're having trouble taking left turns. You can't quite stop. You're an 80 percent bicyclist." So I put a big C stamp on your forehead and then I say, "Here's a unicycle." But as ridiculous as that sounds, that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now. And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of a sudden and start failing calculus all of a sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers. And it's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation. So our model is learn math the way you'd learn anything, like the way you would learn a bicycle. Stay on that bicycle. Fall off that bicycle. Do it as long as necessary until you have mastery. The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to failure. But we do expect mastery.

This is just another one of the modules. This is trigonometry. This is shifting and reflecting functions. And they all fit together. We have about 90 of these right now. And you can go to the site right now. It's all free. Not trying to sell anything. But the general idea is that they all fit into this knowledge map. That top node right there, that's literally single digit addition. It's like one plus one is equal to two. And the paradigm is, once you get 10 in a row on that, it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules. So if you keep further down the knowledge map, we're getting into more advanced arithmetic. Further down, you start getting into pre-algebra and early algebra. Further down, you start getting into algebra one, algebra two, a little bit of precalculus. And the idea is, from this we can actually teach everything -- well, everything that can be taught in this type of a framework. So you can imagine -- and this is what we are working on -- is from this knowledge map you have logic, you have computer programming, you have grammar, you have genetics, all based off of that core of, if you know this and that, now you're ready for this next concept. Now that can work well for an individual learner, and I encourage, one, for you to do it with your kids, but I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself. It'll change what happens at the dinner table.

But what we want to do is to use the natural conclusion of the flipping of the classroom that those early teachers had emailed me about. And so what I'm showing you here, this is actually data from a pilot in the Los Altos school district, where they took two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes and completely gutted their old math curriculum. These kids aren't using textbooks, they're not getting one size fits all lectures. They're doing Khan Academy, they're doing that software, for roughly half of their math class. And I want to make it clear, we don't view this as the complete math education. What it does is -- and this is what's happening in Los Altos -- it frees up time. This is the blocking and tackling, making sure you know how to move through a system of equations, and it frees up time for the simulations, for the games, for the mechanics, for the robot building, for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow.

And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day, every kid works at their own pace -- and this is actually a live dashboard from Los Altos school district -- and they look at this dashboard. Every row is a student. Every column is one of those concepts. Green means the student's already proficient. Blue means they're working on it -- no need to worry. Red means they're stuck. And what the teacher does is literally just say, "Let me intervene on the red kids." Or even better, "Let me get one of the green kids who are already proficient in that concept to be the first line of attack and actually tutor their peer."

Now I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "Oh, what do you not understand?" or "What do you do understand?" and all of the rest. So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers with as much data as possible -- really data that, in almost any other field, is expected, if you're in finance or marketing or manufacturing. And so the teachers can actually diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible. So now the teachers know exactly what the students have been up to, how long they have been spending every day, what videos have they been watching, when did they pause the videos, what did they stop watching, what exercises are they using, what have they been focused on? The outer circle shows what exercises they were focused on. The inner circle shows what videos they're focused on. And the data gets pretty granular so you can see the exact problems that the student got right or wrong. Red is wrong, blue is right. The leftmost question is the first question that the student attempted. They watched the video right over there. And then you can see, eventually, they were able to get 10 in a row. It's almost like you can see them learning over those last 10 problems. They also got faster. The height is how long it took them.

So when you talk about self-paced learning, it makes sense for everyone -- in education-speak, differentiated learning -- but it's kind of crazy when you see it in a classroom. Because every time we've done this, in every classroom we've done, over and over again, if you go five days into it, there's a group of kids who've raced ahead and there's a group of kids who are a little bit slower. And in a traditional model, if you did a snapshot assessment, you say, "These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids. Maybe they should be tracked differently. Maybe we should put them in different classes." But when you let every student work at their own pace -- and we see it over and over and over again -- you see students who took a little bit extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead. And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted. And we're seeing it over and over and over again. And it makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefitted from were really just due to a coincidence of time.

Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale, what's happening in education. And actually, that kind of brings an interesting point. A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom is focused on student-to-teacher ratios. In our mind, the relevant metric is student-to-valuable-human-time- with-the-teacher ratio. So in a traditional model, most of the teacher's time is spent giving lectures and grading and whatnot. Maybe five percent of their time is actually sitting next to students and actually working with them. Now 100 percent of their time is. So once again, using technology, not just flipping the classroom, you're humanizing the classroom, I'd argue, by a factor of five or 10.(citation)

By now I hope that some of you might have spotted the pattern of how a resource-based development process is emerging from this real-time data-centric, yet humane and sociable learning experience. And how smoothly they all integrate into the human intrinsic motivators of autonomy through self-paced lectures, mastery through peer-support, and propose through community/team building technologies.

Finally, this abundance of genuine human capital and intellectual surplus can transform our world through open-source economy. When economic growth had always based on the carrying capacity of the Earth's finite and renewable resources to generate energysurpluses. Not fiat money as debt with interest. And while we've already went beyond peak oil, our civilization has yet to progress itself beyond its oil dependency. Moreover, our prosperity is based on the sustainability and energy efficiency of our complex culture. And not the preservation of a monetary system that creates money out of thin air.

The two proposed solution, as far as I understand it, to America's unemployment, and correct me if I am wrong, seems to be:

a) Stimulate the Economy by printing and throwing as much money as possible at the economy, and hope that, by increasing the amount of money avaliable, people will purchase, creating demand, and thus creating jobs to supply those demands. Because America is so patriotic that people only buy American, even when faced with cheaper Indian, Vietnamese, or Chinese products. This is the policy, I think, our judicious leaders have taken.

b) Let the market regulate itself, because workers will, when faced with unemployment, accept lower wages, and companies will hire them all, even if there is no demand for their product, and we are restored to that happy and blissful seat- in short, it is the best of all possible worlds, and everything lines to create the best of all possible endings.

What do you think is the right policy our nation should take in such a crisis as this?

A. would lead to inflation, last thing we need is for the price of meat to go from 5.99$ To 9.99$. this will force more people out of work....not fix anything. B. woulld be a better choice of the twobut there is better choices. 1 being the removal of most goverment programs the cost the tax payers... next would be to invest in companies that can make money through trade with other countries. As A scientist i will point out inclosed systems fail. the same goes for communities and governments.

Have you not heard of the magical Phillip's curve?

During the late fifties, British economist A.W. Phillips empirically stumbled upon an inverse relationship between unemployment and wages after plotting the figure on a graph. Economist soon realise that this relationship could be found everywhere, and soon, they connected that with inflation and a nifty explaination- as employment rise, the strenght of the labourers is greater, thus, they can raise wages. But the employers realising that this would make them less profit, would raise prices, and the workers, again, realising that this would in fact make their new gain in higher wages not really exist (if prices go up, and wage goes up in the same proportion, there is no gain) if this happens, so they go back to the table, &c. and soon, this will lead to inflation. Likewise, when there is unemployment, deflation occurs because, there being less workers, the workers are willing to work for lower wages, prices will drop, and deflation occurs. Thus, it falls to reason that there is a trade-off between inflation and employment- at least in the short term. The solution is then is to create short term inflation to stimulate the economy, create employment, &c. &c. By creating more money, the people would have more spending power, which will lead to greater purchase, and more demand. So, in effect, the government, in respect to their recent Stimulus and their printing of money, have giant lump of bronze, and they hope that it will seperate itself into copper and tin. Of course, I am no economist, and my explanation may be completely incorrect.

There's at least two problems with that "creating more money" process, when a fiat currency like the US Dollars is made of debt: one is the real physical limitation of our planet's carrying capacity simply cannot sustain an infinite growth.

These monetary learnings allow us to formulate two more extremely important Key Concepts.

The first is that all dollars are backed by debt. At the local bank level, all new money is loaned into existence. At the Federal Reserve level, money is simply manufactured out of thin air and then exchanged for interest-paying government debt. In both cases, the money is backed by debt. Debt that pays interest. From this Key Concept, we can formulate a truly profound statement, which is that at a minimum, each year enough new money must be loaned into existence to cover the interest payments on all of the past outstanding debt.

If we flip this slightly, we can say that each year all the outstanding debt must compound by at least the rate of the interest on that debt. Each and every year it must grow by some percentage. Because our debt-based money system is growing by some percentage continually, it is an exponential system by its very design. A corollary of this is that the amount of debt in the system will always exceed the amount of money.

I am not going to cast judgment on this and say that it is good or it is bad. It simply is what it is. By understanding its design, though, you will be better equipped to understand that the potential range of future outcomes for our economy are not limitless, but rather bounded by the rules of the system.

All of which leads us to the fourth Key Concept, which is that perpetual expansion is a requirement of modern banking. In fact we can make a rule: Each year, new credit (loans) must be made that at least equal the amount of all the outstanding interest payments that year. Without a continuous expansion of the money supply, past debts would not be able to be serviced, and defaults would ripple through, and possibly destroy, the entire system. Defaults are the Achilles heel of a debt-based money system, which we saw in our local banking example in the previous chapter. Because of this, all the institutional and political forces in our society are geared towards avoiding this outcome.

So the banking system must continually expand – not necessarily because it is the right (or wrong) thing to do, but, rather, simply because that is how it was designed. It is a feature of the system, just like using gasoline is a feature of my car’s engine. I might wish and hope that my car would run on straw, but I’d be wasting my time, because that’s just not how it was designed.

By understanding the requirement for continual expansion, we will be in a better position to make informed decisions about what’s likely to transpire and take meaningful actions to enhance our prospects.

More philosophically, we might wonder about the long-term viability of a system that must expand exponentially but which exists on a spherical planet. The key question is, “Can our current money system somehow be modified to be stable, fair, and useful when it is not growing?”

So the question is this: What happens when a human-contrived money system that must expand, by its very design, runs headlong into the physical limits of a spherical planet?(citation)

And two is the historical destruction of the currency itself due to hyperinflation.

It is crucially important that a nation’s money supply is carefully managed, for if it is not, the monetary unit can be destroyed by inflation. In fact, there are over 3,800 past examples of paper currencies that no longer exist. There are numerous examples from the United States, which may have some collector value but no longer possess any monetary value. Of course, I could just as easily display beautiful but no longer functional examples from Argentina, Bolivia, and Columbia, and a hundred other places

How does a hyperinflationary destruction of a currency happen?

Here’s a relatively recent example that comes from Yugoslavia between the years 1988 and 1995. Pre-1990, the Yugoslavian dinar had measurable value: You could actually buy something with one. However, throughout the 1980’s, the Yugoslavian government ran a persistent budget deficit and printed money to make up the shortfall. By the early 1990’s, the government had used up all its own hard currency reserves, and they proceeded to loot the private accounts of citizens. In order to keep things moving along, successively larger bills had to be printed, finally culminating in this stunning example – a 500 billion dinar note. At its height, inflation in Yugoslavia was running at over 37% per day. This means prices were doubling every 48 hours or so.

Let me see if I can make that more concrete for you. Suppose that on January 1, 2007, you had a penny and could find something to purchase with it. At 37% per day inflation, by April 3, 2007 you’d need one of these – a billion dollar bill – to purchase the very same item. In reverse, if you’d had a billion dollars on January 1st stuffed in a suitcase, by April 3rd you’d have had a penny’s worth of purchasing power left.

Clearly, if you’d attempted to save money during this period of time, you’d have lost it all, so we can safely state that inflationary money regimes impose a penalty on savers. The opposite side of this is that inflationary money regimes promote spending and require that money be invested or speculated, so as to at least have the chance of keeping pace with inflation. Of course, investing and speculating involve risks, so we can broaden this statement to include the claim that inflationary monetary systems require the citizens living within them to subject their hard-earned savings to risk.

That is worth pondering for a minute or two.

Even more importantly, since history shows how common it is for currencies to be mismanaged, we need to keep a careful eye on the stewards of our money to make sure they are not being irresponsible by creating too much money out of thin air and thereby destroying our savings, culture, and institutions by the process of inflation.(citation)

That's why a fiat currency is doomed to fail by its very design. And now with electronic payment system, hyperinflation can run its course without relying on printing large bills.

Jacob Goldstein: Because now, if you think of most of the money that you have, or most of the money that I have, it's never currency. I get paid. That is just a direct deposit from NPR, from my employer, to my checking account. It's not like they give me a bunch of hundred dollar bills every week. And then, I pay my bills online. So currency even now is like old-fashioned. You don't have to touch money. You don't have to see it. It's just information.Money is just an abstract and arbitrary made-belief, there's no intrinsic value in a fiat currency we use in the modern world.

Ira Glass: Until this conversation it never occurred to me that money doesn't change hands when we pay our bills online or anything. Like I don't know why I never even stopped to think, right, at no point does the bank go and deliver like $100 to the phone company on my behalf. It really is just numbers going back and forth in the computer.

Jacob Goldstein: Yeah. Nothing happens in the physical world. I mean I guess, except electrical pulses I guess it would be flying back and forth between computers. The money doesn't really exist. Not only is there no gold. There aren't even bills for most of the money that exists. Most of the money that exists is just the idea. It's just the bank saying, yes, there is this much money in your account.(citation)

So in conclusion, Money is just an abstract and arbitrary made-belief, there's no intrinsic value in a fiat currency we use in the modern world. But we're all made to believe that it's somehow important.

The two proposed solution, as far as I understand it, to America's unemployment, and correct me if I am wrong, seems to be:

a) Stimulate the Economy by printing and throwing as much money as possible at the economy, and hope that, by increasing the amount of money avaliable, people will purchase, creating demand, and thus creating jobs to supply those demands. Because America is so patriotic that people only buy American, even when faced with cheaper Indian, Vietnamese, or Chinese products. This is the policy, I think, our judicious leaders have taken.

b) Let the market regulate itself, because workers will, when faced with unemployment, accept lower wages, and companies will hire them all, even if there is no demand for their product, and we are restored to that happy and blissful seat- in short, it is the best of all possible worlds, and everything lines to create the best of all possible endings.

What do you think is the right policy our nation should take in such a crisis as this?

If only people would just see through the entertainment buzz, without themselves being indoctrinated into believing that it's somehow a dirty word. Then hopefully they would realize for themselves that socialism is about establishing an egalitarian society.

So, you would rather us go back to the Gold Standard or to a Commidity Currency system instead of our current Fiat system? I am not quite sure that getting rid of the Fiat Currency, which is simply money which the Government insures is legal tender, would be all that beneficial, being that Gold back currency would deflate the dollar to the point where, while it is worth much more, it is less competitive than- say- every other Fiat currency in the world, that is, every other currency in the world. Let us say we go back to backing our money with Gold, say, at the Bretton-Woods' 35 dollar for every ounce, Gold is, as of today, worth at around 1800$. That would make a single of our hypothetical dollar worth around 50 of our current dollar, and a single hypothetical cent worth around fifty cents. And, because there is only a limited supply of Gold in our Goverment treasury, Money becomes even more scarce. I do not think that massive deflation is the way to go. We may as well go back to the Pound, divide that into crowns, half-crowns, shillings, sixpence, thrupence, tuppence, penny, ha'penny, fathings, half-farthings and, if that is not enough, quarter-farthings if we do.

No. Not when all money become a useless and arbitrary bartering system in a resource/energy(not monetary) based economy. It can't measure electricity by watts, food by nutritional facts, civilization by prosperity, health and wellness by freedom from diseases, human flourishing by humanity, nor sustainability by bio diversity. It's a cultural legacy of no intrinsic usefulness or value within the context of nature.

So, you want to get rid of money in general, and replace that with the redistribution of energy and resources? That would have to be on an international level, because countries, in general, do not produce all of the resources it needs. Who will be the one to decide the most efficient distribution? The government? Let us assume the government is in charge of all this, and that we elect the government, who is to say that we should be able to trust them? Or that there is someone more qualified to resdistribute weath than ourselves? But, say it works, and that there is a egality in the distribution, then how would the system cope with this human disire known as 'want'? For example, how would it cope with the 'I want this, and he has it'? Obviously, we can have a system where we make everyone into selfless caring people, either by trying to eliminate the greed they have through Fun-Camps and Friendly-Land, and then everyone will all be happy nice people who give what they have to someone else who wants it, and that person would carefully accept and will be able to do the same if given the chance, which bascially amounts to brainwashing, or we could barter our tangible resources, for example, fifty bushel of wheat and a door-nail, in exchange for other tangible resources, say Milton's Paradise Lost and Hustler's magazine issue 205. That depends on the existence of Reciprocated and Mutual desire, with both parties desiring what the other has, for example, I may want Milton and Hustler, but the other fellow may not want wheat or door nails. That is why we have money, because it eliminates the need of mutual and reciprocated desire for transaction, money, either commidity based or fiat based, has the property of being able to procure objects, and has the property of procuring object- that is, it is valid now, and can be valid in the future- though, that also depends on the confidence in the money's ability. Most Socialist, including the most famous, Charles Henry Marx (an anglicisation of his name, you may well note), have been wise enough to induce the utility of money within any economic system dependant the human emotion known as 'desire', that is, almost all economic system. Even at the most primitive level, desire is the core of all economic transaction. Then, if this problem does not exist, then there is the problem of how to get there. Do we go there immediately, and rush to where angels dare not tread, or do we arrive there in graduations.

Brainwashing? Well talk about your irony. When the fact is your false-positive superstition on mere "desire" as human nature, is but a naturalistic fallacy within the context of social psychology and neuroscience. When the fact is humans as social animals both desire and need the experience of belongingness, not mere material possession.

Belonging-ness as a Basic Need

Just as protein is needed in the diet for the health of the body, so belongingness is a basic need for the mind and soul. In the early years of the study of depth psychology, different innovators explored our “basic” motivations. Freud suggested sex and aggression as two key drives, Alfred Adler noted the seeking of the sense of superiority to counter inferiority feelings, and Jung noted a wide range of archetypal sources of motivation. Others also came up with their suggestions.

By the 1940s, though, child development research had considered another interesting disease that was prevalent again in orphanages, variously called "hospitalism," "anaclitic depression", or “marasmus," and describing the way some babies became sickly and often died! They traced this not to not being fed, but not being sufficiently cuddled, touched, played with! Other researchers supported the growing need for contact—and this in some ways was in contrast to a fashion in the child-rearing texts of the 1920s and 1930s to not pick up the crying child lest he be “spoiled.” (The success of the Doctor Spock books in the late 1940s was due to his challenging this anti-spoiling regiment. Benjamin Spock didn’t support “permissiveness” as his enemies accused, but simply not being harshly reserved.)

Psychoanalysts in the 1950s wove such research into revisions of theory, and while some stayed with Freud’s earlier “drive” theories, a fair number came to espouse what came to be called object relations theory. (This term refers to the object of a person’s love—and/or hate—, but many think of objects as inanimate, so the term is somewhat somewhat misleading; the theory itself seeks to highlight the intensity and depth of interpersonal relations.)

Much of object relations theory originally was based on observations about the interactions of infants and young children and their parents or caretakers, but what should be realized as that these early bonding experiences, with all their ups and downs, is only a small part of the richness of the dynamic! By age four to six, young children expand the scope of their worlds to include wider circles of friends, neighbors, and more abstract entities. Kids hear about and begin to root for the teams their parents root for, begin to relate to the family’s or communities myths about gods or spiritual entities, partake of ethnic identities, and feel patriotism and other sorts of loyalty. The term, belongingness, then, is more understandable and inclusive of our broader, more complex and life-long needs for feeling connected.(citation)

However, that human need for the experience of belongingness through social connection got highjacked by the psychotic corporate cultural practice of perception management from cradle to grave. AKA your "Fun-Camps" and "Friendly-Land" created by the corporations. When they basically socialized our children that in order for them to be worthy of belongingness, they need to possess their products, while compete in an arbitrary social hierarchy of vanity and shallowness.

Actually, I never said it is in man's nature to 'desire', but that desire, as in material desire, is the driving force of all economic transaction. Maybe there are people simply content with the satisfaction of 'Belonging'- whether to a community, a religion, a family, what ever, but, it is also true that some people have material want. It is not an illusion created by the corporations, material wants is what drove trade since the beginning of time, before the creation of corporations, before Capitalism, etc. But all this still avoids the question that I posit, how does your proposed system work? How does it overcome those limitations? How do we get to it? If it doesn't answer those question, it cannot work as an economic model.

The psychological dark triad of a personality continuum for narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy does predate the creation of corporations, governments, and capitalism as systems of modern society. When these ideas as dangerous memes are only the manifestos of said evil personalities, which later on became their own cultural legacies and social processes for evil.

The common thread running through all three traits of The Dark Triad (Machiavellianism, subclinical narcissism, and subclinical psychopathy) is high selfishness and low disagreeableness. Still, the three traits are only moderately correlated with one another, and recently researchers have started to assess the independent predictions of each separately from the others, and how people with a different balance of the Dark Triad go about obtaining their goals differently. For instance, recent research conducted by Peter Jonason, Glenn Geher, and myself suggests that narcissism is tied most heavily to extroversion and a desire to engage in social interactions whereas psychopathy is negatively related to extroversion.

Also of particular note is how each member of The Dark Triad is differentially related to different forms of impulsivity. Scott J. Dickman differentiates between two different forms of impulsivity: functional impulsivity and dysfunctional impulsivity. Functional impulsivity is related to idea generation, enthusiasm, adventurousness, and the ability to make quick decisions. On the other hand, dysfunctional impulsivity is related to erratic disorderliness, distraction, and inaccurate decision making.

To see how each of the members of The Dark Triad is related to impulsivity, Daniel N. Jones and Delroy L. Paulhus recently administered a battery of Dark Triad and impulsivity tests to 142 undergraduates as well as 329 adults in the community. Their measure of Psychopathy included four components: erratic lifestyle (e.g., "I am a rebellious person"), interpersonal manipulation (e.g., "I would get a kick out of 'scamming' someone"), callous affect ("e.g., "Most people are wimps"), and antisocial behavior (e.g., "I have tricked someone into giving me money"). They found that all four components of Psychopathy were extremely highly related to one another. Their measure of Machiavellianism included items such as "Anyone who completely trusts anyone else is asking for trouble" and their measure of narcissism included items such as "I like to be the center of attention". Finally, their measure of functional impulsivity included items such as "Most of the time, I can put my thoughts into words very rapidly", whereas their measure of dysfunctional impulsivity included items such as "I often get into trouble because I do not think before I act."

Even though the inter-correlations among the members of the Dark Triad were higher in the community sample, they found a similar pattern of results for both the student and community sample. Both narcissistic and psychopathic individuals tended to show higher levels of overall impulsivity. More telling though were correlations with the different types of impulsivity. Psychopathy was primarily associated with dysfunctional impulsivity, whereas narcissism was primarily related to functional impulsivity. Interestingly, Machavellianism was unrelated to either type of impulsivity.

According to the researchers, these results help explain why narcissism is a mixed blessing. In situations where accuracy is less important than speedy responses (e.g., short-term social interactions), functional impulsivity will be adaptive for narcissists. Over time, though, even functional impulsivity will start to show detrimental effects on interpersonal relationships.

The link between psychopathy and dysfunctional impulsivity is consistent with other research showing that psychopaths lack the ability to inhibit their antisocial impulses. The lack of relation between impulsivity and Machiavellianism is interesting and the researchers suggest that Machiavellian individuals may have an advantage over psychopaths and narcissists because their moderate impulse control may allow them to "refrain from counterproductive behaviors despite their selfish intentions".

The researchers conclude,

"Taken together, our two studies add to the accumulating evidence that the Dark Triad members have unique personality styles favoring different life outcomes. Each member has a unique social engagement style that might prove adaptive in some situations but maladaptive in others."

By studying beautiful minds as well as not-so beautiful minds, I think we can come to a more nuanced and richer understanding of human nature and the various paths by which people obtain their goals.(citation)

And it's exactly through the moral neutral that is our cultural legacy, where we can master the social process of empathy and altruism, starting with an education reform. Which Sir Ken Robinson had explained rather well in his TED Talk called Changing education paradigms. That "the problem is they are trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past." While "on the way they are alienating millions of kids who don't see any purpose in going to school."

I believe we need our children to surpass ourselves as future leaders in a global community, which means we need to cultivate them within a cultural legacy of leadership based on "listen, learn, then lead".

And you have to watch and take care of each other. I probably learned the most about relationships. I learned they are the sinew which hold the force together. I grew up much of my career in the Ranger regiment. And every morning in the Ranger regiment, every Ranger -- and there are more than 2,000 of them -- says a six-stanza Ranger creed. You may know one line of it, it says, "I'll never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy." And it's not a mindless mantra, and it's not a poem. It's a promise. Every Ranger promises every other Ranger now matter what happens, no matter what it costs me, if you need me, I'm coming. And every Ranger gets that same promise from every other Ranger. Think about it. It's extraordinarily powerful. It's probably more powerful than marriage vows. And they've lived up to it, which gives it special power. And so the organizational relationship that bonds them is just amazing.

And I learned personal relationships were more important than ever. We were in a difficult operation in Afghanistan in 2007, and an old friend of mine, that I had spent many years at various points of my career with -- godfather to one of their kids -- he sent me a note, just in an envelope, that had a quote from Sherman to Grant that said, "I knew if I ever got in a tight spot, that you would come, if alive." And having that kind of relationship, for me, turned out to be critical at many points in my career.

And I learned that you have to give that in this environment, because it's tough. That was my journey. I hope it's not over. I came to believe that a leader isn't good because they're right; they're good because they're willing to learn and to trust. This isn't easy stuff. It's not like that electronic abs machine where, 15 minutes a month, you get washboard abs. And it isn't always fair. You can get knocked down, and it hurts and it leaves scars. But if you're a leader, the people you've counted on will help you up. And if you're a leader, the people who count on you need you on your feet.(citation)

That's not cultural legacy grounded in academics, but rather it's about ethics and empathy. Which is rightfully so considering the next revolutionary shift in learning global politics through complex, engaging, and dynamic "World Peace" game.

And so this World Peace Game I'd like to tell you about. It started out like this: it's just a four-foot by five-foot plywood board in an inner-city urban school, 1978. I was creating a lesson for students on Africa. We put all the problems of the world there, and I thought, let's let them solve it. I didn't want to lecture or have just book reading. I wanted to have them be immersed and learn the feeling of learning through their bodies. So I thought, well they like to play games. I'll make something -- I didn't say interactive. We didn't have that term in 1978 -- but something interactive. And so we made the game, and it has since evolved to a four-foot by four-foot by four-foot Plexiglass structure. And it has four Plexiglass layers.

There's an outer space layer with black holes and satellites and research satellites and asteroid mining. There's an air and space level with clouds that are big puffs of cotton we push around and territorial air spaces and air forces, a ground and sea level with thousands of game pieces on it -- even an undersea level with submarines and undersea mining. There are four countries around the board. The kids make up the names of the countries -- some are rich some are poor. They have different assets, commercial and military. And each country has a cabinet. There's a prime minister, secretary of state, minister of defense and a CFO, or comptroller. I choose the prime minister based on my relationship with them. I offer them the job, they can turn it down, and then they choose their own cabinet. There's a World Bank, arms dealers and a United Nations. There's also a weather goddess who controls a random stock market and random weather.

That's not all. And then there's a 13-page crisis document with 50 interlocking problems. So that, if one thing changes, everything else changes. I throw them into this complex matrix, and they trust me because we have a deep, rich relationship together. And so with all these crises, we have -- let's see -- ethnic and minority tensions; we have chemical and nuclear spills, nuclear proliferation. There's oil spills, environmental disasters, water rights disputes, breakaway republics, famine, endangered species and global warming. If Al Gore is here, I'm going to send my fourth-graders from Agnor-Hurt and Venable school to you because they solved global warming in a week. And they've done it several times too.

So I also have in the game a saboteur -- some child -- it's basically a troublemaker -- and I have my troublemaker put to use because they, on the surface, are trying to save the world and their position in the game. But they're also trying to undermine everything in the game. And they do it secretly through misinformation and ambiguities and irrelevancies, trying to cause everyone to think more deeply. The saboteur is there, and we also read from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War." Fourth-graders understand it -- nine years old -- and they handle that and use that to understand how to, not follow -- at first they do -- the paths to power and destruction, the path to war. They learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking, to think in a long-term, more consequential way.(citation)

So that's one example of how to cultivate ethics and empathy within children through self-guided social gaming. But what about academic learning that's insofar had always been done in a dehumanizing, individualistic, and atomized environment? Well one Salman Khan has an interesting and innovative alternative in his TED Talk called Let's use video to reinvent education.

The other thing that happened -- and even at this point, I said, "Okay, maybe it's a good supplement. It's good for motivated students. It's good for maybe home schoolers." But I didn't think it would be something that would somehow penetrate the classroom. But then I started getting letters from teachers. And the teachers would write, saying, "We use your videos to flip the classroom. You've given the lectures, so now what we do ... " and this could happen in every classroom in America tomorrow, " ... what I do is I assign the lectures for homework. And what used to be homework, I now have the students doing in the classroom."

And I want to pause here for a second, because there's a couple of interesting things. One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit -- the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did. They can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. But the more interesting thing is -- and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom -- by removing the one size fits all lecture from the classroom and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, and then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom. They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience -- 30 kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other. A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one size fits all lecture to 30 students -- blank faces, slightly antagonistic -- and now it's a human experience. Now they're actually interacting with each other.

So once the Khan Academy -- I quit my job and we turned into a real organization -- we're a not-for-profit -- the question is, how do we take this to the next level? How do we take what those teachers are doing to their natural conclusion? And so what I'm showing you over here, these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins. The ones I started were much more primitive. This is a more competent version of it. But the paradigm here is, we'll generate as many questions as you need until you get that concept, until you get 10 in a row. And the Khan Academy videos are there. You get hints, the actual steps for that problem, if you don't know how to do it. But the paradigm here, it seems like a very simple thing: 10 in a row, you move on. But it's fundamentally different than what's happening in classrooms right now.

In a traditional classroom, you have a couple of homework, homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. And that exam, whether you get a 70 percent, an 80 percent, a 90 percent, or a 95 percent, the class moves on to the next topic. And even that 95 percent student, what was the five percent they didn't know? Maybe they didn't know what happens when you raise something to the zero power. And then you go build on that in the next concept. That's analogous to imagine learning to ride a bicycle, and maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time, and I give you that bicycle for two weeks. And then I come back after two weeks, and I say, "Well, let's see. You're having trouble taking left turns. You can't quite stop. You're an 80 percent bicyclist." So I put a big C stamp on your forehead and then I say, "Here's a unicycle." But as ridiculous as that sounds, that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now. And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of a sudden and start failing calculus all of a sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers. And it's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation. So our model is learn math the way you'd learn anything, like the way you would learn a bicycle. Stay on that bicycle. Fall off that bicycle. Do it as long as necessary until you have mastery. The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to failure. But we do expect mastery.

This is just another one of the modules. This is trigonometry. This is shifting and reflecting functions. And they all fit together. We have about 90 of these right now. And you can go to the site right now. It's all free. Not trying to sell anything. But the general idea is that they all fit into this knowledge map. That top node right there, that's literally single digit addition. It's like one plus one is equal to two. And the paradigm is, once you get 10 in a row on that, it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules. So if you keep further down the knowledge map, we're getting into more advanced arithmetic. Further down, you start getting into pre-algebra and early algebra. Further down, you start getting into algebra one, algebra two, a little bit of precalculus. And the idea is, from this we can actually teach everything -- well, everything that can be taught in this type of a framework. So you can imagine -- and this is what we are working on -- is from this knowledge map you have logic, you have computer programming, you have grammar, you have genetics, all based off of that core of, if you know this and that, now you're ready for this next concept. Now that can work well for an individual learner, and I encourage, one, for you to do it with your kids, but I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself. It'll change what happens at the dinner table.

But what we want to do is to use the natural conclusion of the flipping of the classroom that those early teachers had emailed me about. And so what I'm showing you here, this is actually data from a pilot in the Los Altos school district, where they took two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes and completely gutted their old math curriculum. These kids aren't using textbooks, they're not getting one size fits all lectures. They're doing Khan Academy, they're doing that software, for roughly half of their math class. And I want to make it clear, we don't view this as the complete math education. What it does is -- and this is what's happening in Los Altos -- it frees up time. This is the blocking and tackling, making sure you know how to move through a system of equations, and it frees up time for the simulations, for the games, for the mechanics, for the robot building, for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow.

And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day, every kid works at their own pace -- and this is actually a live dashboard from Los Altos school district -- and they look at this dashboard. Every row is a student. Every column is one of those concepts. Green means the student's already proficient. Blue means they're working on it -- no need to worry. Red means they're stuck. And what the teacher does is literally just say, "Let me intervene on the red kids." Or even better, "Let me get one of the green kids who are already proficient in that concept to be the first line of attack and actually tutor their peer."

Now I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "Oh, what do you not understand?" or "What do you do understand?" and all of the rest. So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers with as much data as possible -- really data that, in almost any other field, is expected, if you're in finance or marketing or manufacturing. And so the teachers can actually diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible. So now the teachers know exactly what the students have been up to, how long they have been spending every day, what videos have they been watching, when did they pause the videos, what did they stop watching, what exercises are they using, what have they been focused on? The outer circle shows what exercises they were focused on. The inner circle shows what videos they're focused on. And the data gets pretty granular so you can see the exact problems that the student got right or wrong. Red is wrong, blue is right. The leftmost question is the first question that the student attempted. They watched the video right over there. And then you can see, eventually, they were able to get 10 in a row. It's almost like you can see them learning over those last 10 problems. They also got faster. The height is how long it took them.

So when you talk about self-paced learning, it makes sense for everyone -- in education-speak, differentiated learning -- but it's kind of crazy when you see it in a classroom. Because every time we've done this, in every classroom we've done, over and over again, if you go five days into it, there's a group of kids who've raced ahead and there's a group of kids who are a little bit slower. And in a traditional model, if you did a snapshot assessment, you say, "These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids. Maybe they should be tracked differently. Maybe we should put them in different classes." But when you let every student work at their own pace -- and we see it over and over and over again -- you see students who took a little bit extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead. And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted. And we're seeing it over and over and over again. And it makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefitted from were really just due to a coincidence of time.

Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale, what's happening in education. And actually, that kind of brings an interesting point. A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom is focused on student-to-teacher ratios. In our mind, the relevant metric is student-to-valuable-human-time- with-the-teacher ratio. So in a traditional model, most of the teacher's time is spent giving lectures and grading and whatnot. Maybe five percent of their time is actually sitting next to students and actually working with them. Now 100 percent of their time is. So once again, using technology, not just flipping the classroom, you're humanizing the classroom, I'd argue, by a factor of five or 10.(citation)

By now I hope that some of you might have spotted the pattern of how a resource-based development process is emerging from this real-time data-centric, yet humane and sociable learning experience. And how smoothly they all integrate into the human intrinsic motivators of autonomy through self-paced lectures, mastery through peer-support, and propose through community/team building technologies.

Finally, this abundance of genuine human capital and intellectual surplus can transform our world through open-source economy. When economic growth had always based on the carrying capacity of the Earth's finite and renewable resources to generate energysurpluses. Not fiat money as debt with interest. And while we've already went beyond peak oil, our civilization has yet to progress itself beyond its oil dependency. Moreover, our prosperity is based on the sustainability and energy efficiency of our complex culture. And not the preservation of a monetary system that creates money out of thin air.

So, you answer to curb the natural self-interest of some is the indoctrination of all? The process seems to be, first, that they must listen closely to their teacher- reasonable- then, they must submit themselves to his ideas, and then they must apply what they submitted themselves to. Take the world peace affair you have mentioned- lenghtily- the student must first listen with awe at their teacher, submit themselves to his wise commands, let him choose a leader among thier pseudo-micronation, submit themselves to the establishment he has establish, then lead and live within the establishment that he created. I cannot say that I am totally convinced of this system to instill the values of virtue, charity, altruism, and honesty in our children, mainly because, when press to accept a value, I have no doubt that some will rebel, and stray far into the other direction.

This dungeon, for it is thus, would not instill the necessary values that is needed to all children for this to work. Being so, and shedding the individual for the community, let us ignore the obvious difficulty of overhaulling an overhaul of our educational system and turning to something more akin to forcing Children to pledge themselves to the Motherland and the Government- or the T'sar, or the Emperor, or that stand in of the government, the Flag- than something that promotes anything genuinely intelligent. You suppose that we should base our economy on Energy- where does "Want" play in? Even the best of us have wants- and many of us have wants beyond the simple feeling of community or spirituality- I have energy and food (pretend we already figured out how to effectively distribute them in the best possible way and in the most efficient possible manner), how would my desire for something else get satisfied? Do we barter- the problem has already been discussed in more detail previously- or, more likely, do we turn to money? Do we have a commodity monetary unit- what should it be? Food and Energy? Certainly, if we are in a community with sufficient Food and Energy, even if we have finally figured out a way to trade energy, we would have no want of it, because there is sufficient amount of it, and it is completely valueless because it is so abundant. Maybe I am interpreting it all wrong, and thus, I am not convinced of its merit. Maybe there is something that I have missed, and, should I see it more clearly, I would be absolutely convinced. Maybe I need it put in more lucid language. No matter, I am still unconvinced.

The two proposed solution, as far as I understand it, to America's unemployment, and correct me if I am wrong, seems to be:

a) Stimulate the Economy by printing and throwing as much money as possible at the economy, and hope that, by increasing the amount of money avaliable, people will purchase, creating demand, and thus creating jobs to supply those demands. Because America is so patriotic that people only buy American, even when faced with cheaper Indian, Vietnamese, or Chinese products. This is the policy, I think, our judicious leaders have taken.

b) Let the market regulate itself, because workers will, when faced with unemployment, accept lower wages, and companies will hire them all, even if there is no demand for their product, and we are restored to that happy and blissful seat- in short, it is the best of all possible worlds, and everything lines to create the best of all possible endings.

What do you think is the right policy our nation should take in such a crisis as this?

A. would lead to inflation, last thing we need is for the price of meat to go from 5.99$ To 9.99$. this will force more people out of work....not fix anything. B. woulld be a better choice of the twobut there is better choices. 1 being the removal of most goverment programs the cost the tax payers... next would be to invest in companies that can make money through trade with other countries. As A scientist i will point out inclosed systems fail. the same goes for communities and governments.

Have you not heard of the magical Phillip's curve?

During the late fifties, British economist A.W. Phillips empirically stumbled upon an inverse relationship between unemployment and wages after plotting the figure on a graph. Economist soon realise that this relationship could be found everywhere, and soon, they connected that with inflation and a nifty explaination- as employment rise, the strenght of the labourers is greater, thus, they can raise wages. But the employers realising that this would make them less profit, would raise prices, and the workers, again, realising that this would in fact make their new gain in higher wages not really exist (if prices go up, and wage goes up in the same proportion, there is no gain) if this happens, so they go back to the table, &c. and soon, this will lead to inflation. Likewise, when there is unemployment, deflation occurs because, there being less workers, the workers are willing to work for lower wages, prices will drop, and deflation occurs. Thus, it falls to reason that there is a trade-off between inflation and employment- at least in the short term. The solution is then is to create short term inflation to stimulate the economy, create employment, &c. &c. By creating more money, the people would have more spending power, which will lead to greater purchase, and more demand. So, in effect, the government, in respect to their recent Stimulus and their printing of money, have giant lump of bronze, and they hope that it will seperate itself into copper and tin. Of course, I am no economist, and my explanation may be completely incorrect.

There's at least two problems with that "creating more money" process, when a fiat currency like the US Dollars is made of debt: one is the real physical limitation of our planet's carrying capacity simply cannot sustain an infinite growth.

These monetary learnings allow us to formulate two more extremely important Key Concepts.

The first is that all dollars are backed by debt. At the local bank level, all new money is loaned into existence. At the Federal Reserve level, money is simply manufactured out of thin air and then exchanged for interest-paying government debt. In both cases, the money is backed by debt. Debt that pays interest. From this Key Concept, we can formulate a truly profound statement, which is that at a minimum, each year enough new money must be loaned into existence to cover the interest payments on all of the past outstanding debt.

If we flip this slightly, we can say that each year all the outstanding debt must compound by at least the rate of the interest on that debt. Each and every year it must grow by some percentage. Because our debt-based money system is growing by some percentage continually, it is an exponential system by its very design. A corollary of this is that the amount of debt in the system will always exceed the amount of money.

I am not going to cast judgment on this and say that it is good or it is bad. It simply is what it is. By understanding its design, though, you will be better equipped to understand that the potential range of future outcomes for our economy are not limitless, but rather bounded by the rules of the system.

All of which leads us to the fourth Key Concept, which is that perpetual expansion is a requirement of modern banking. In fact we can make a rule: Each year, new credit (loans) must be made that at least equal the amount of all the outstanding interest payments that year. Without a continuous expansion of the money supply, past debts would not be able to be serviced, and defaults would ripple through, and possibly destroy, the entire system. Defaults are the Achilles heel of a debt-based money system, which we saw in our local banking example in the previous chapter. Because of this, all the institutional and political forces in our society are geared towards avoiding this outcome.

So the banking system must continually expand – not necessarily because it is the right (or wrong) thing to do, but, rather, simply because that is how it was designed. It is a feature of the system, just like using gasoline is a feature of my car’s engine. I might wish and hope that my car would run on straw, but I’d be wasting my time, because that’s just not how it was designed.

By understanding the requirement for continual expansion, we will be in a better position to make informed decisions about what’s likely to transpire and take meaningful actions to enhance our prospects.

More philosophically, we might wonder about the long-term viability of a system that must expand exponentially but which exists on a spherical planet. The key question is, “Can our current money system somehow be modified to be stable, fair, and useful when it is not growing?”

So the question is this: What happens when a human-contrived money system that must expand, by its very design, runs headlong into the physical limits of a spherical planet?(citation)

And two is the historical destruction of the currency itself due to hyperinflation.

It is crucially important that a nation’s money supply is carefully managed, for if it is not, the monetary unit can be destroyed by inflation. In fact, there are over 3,800 past examples of paper currencies that no longer exist. There are numerous examples from the United States, which may have some collector value but no longer possess any monetary value. Of course, I could just as easily display beautiful but no longer functional examples from Argentina, Bolivia, and Columbia, and a hundred other places

How does a hyperinflationary destruction of a currency happen?

Here’s a relatively recent example that comes from Yugoslavia between the years 1988 and 1995. Pre-1990, the Yugoslavian dinar had measurable value: You could actually buy something with one. However, throughout the 1980’s, the Yugoslavian government ran a persistent budget deficit and printed money to make up the shortfall. By the early 1990’s, the government had used up all its own hard currency reserves, and they proceeded to loot the private accounts of citizens. In order to keep things moving along, successively larger bills had to be printed, finally culminating in this stunning example – a 500 billion dinar note. At its height, inflation in Yugoslavia was running at over 37% per day. This means prices were doubling every 48 hours or so.

Let me see if I can make that more concrete for you. Suppose that on January 1, 2007, you had a penny and could find something to purchase with it. At 37% per day inflation, by April 3, 2007 you’d need one of these – a billion dollar bill – to purchase the very same item. In reverse, if you’d had a billion dollars on January 1st stuffed in a suitcase, by April 3rd you’d have had a penny’s worth of purchasing power left.

Clearly, if you’d attempted to save money during this period of time, you’d have lost it all, so we can safely state that inflationary money regimes impose a penalty on savers. The opposite side of this is that inflationary money regimes promote spending and require that money be invested or speculated, so as to at least have the chance of keeping pace with inflation. Of course, investing and speculating involve risks, so we can broaden this statement to include the claim that inflationary monetary systems require the citizens living within them to subject their hard-earned savings to risk.

That is worth pondering for a minute or two.

Even more importantly, since history shows how common it is for currencies to be mismanaged, we need to keep a careful eye on the stewards of our money to make sure they are not being irresponsible by creating too much money out of thin air and thereby destroying our savings, culture, and institutions by the process of inflation.(citation)

That's why a fiat currency is doomed to fail by its very design. And now with electronic payment system, hyperinflation can run its course without relying on printing large bills.

Jacob Goldstein: Because now, if you think of most of the money that you have, or most of the money that I have, it's never currency. I get paid. That is just a direct deposit from NPR, from my employer, to my checking account. It's not like they give me a bunch of hundred dollar bills every week. And then, I pay my bills online. So currency even now is like old-fashioned. You don't have to touch money. You don't have to see it. It's just information.Money is just an abstract and arbitrary made-belief, there's no intrinsic value in a fiat currency we use in the modern world.

Ira Glass: Until this conversation it never occurred to me that money doesn't change hands when we pay our bills online or anything. Like I don't know why I never even stopped to think, right, at no point does the bank go and deliver like $100 to the phone company on my behalf. It really is just numbers going back and forth in the computer.

Jacob Goldstein: Yeah. Nothing happens in the physical world. I mean I guess, except electrical pulses I guess it would be flying back and forth between computers. The money doesn't really exist. Not only is there no gold. There aren't even bills for most of the money that exists. Most of the money that exists is just the idea. It's just the bank saying, yes, there is this much money in your account.(citation)

So in conclusion, Money is just an abstract and arbitrary made-belief, there's no intrinsic value in a fiat currency we use in the modern world. But we're all made to believe that it's somehow important.

The two proposed solution, as far as I understand it, to America's unemployment, and correct me if I am wrong, seems to be:

a) Stimulate the Economy by printing and throwing as much money as possible at the economy, and hope that, by increasing the amount of money avaliable, people will purchase, creating demand, and thus creating jobs to supply those demands. Because America is so patriotic that people only buy American, even when faced with cheaper Indian, Vietnamese, or Chinese products. This is the policy, I think, our judicious leaders have taken.

b) Let the market regulate itself, because workers will, when faced with unemployment, accept lower wages, and companies will hire them all, even if there is no demand for their product, and we are restored to that happy and blissful seat- in short, it is the best of all possible worlds, and everything lines to create the best of all possible endings.

What do you think is the right policy our nation should take in such a crisis as this?

If only people would just see through the entertainment buzz, without themselves being indoctrinated into believing that it's somehow a dirty word. Then hopefully they would realize for themselves that socialism is about establishing an egalitarian society.

So, you would rather us go back to the Gold Standard or to a Commidity Currency system instead of our current Fiat system? I am not quite sure that getting rid of the Fiat Currency, which is simply money which the Government insures is legal tender, would be all that beneficial, being that Gold back currency would deflate the dollar to the point where, while it is worth much more, it is less competitive than- say- every other Fiat currency in the world, that is, every other currency in the world. Let us say we go back to backing our money with Gold, say, at the Bretton-Woods' 35 dollar for every ounce, Gold is, as of today, worth at around 1800$. That would make a single of our hypothetical dollar worth around 50 of our current dollar, and a single hypothetical cent worth around fifty cents. And, because there is only a limited supply of Gold in our Goverment treasury, Money becomes even more scarce. I do not think that massive deflation is the way to go. We may as well go back to the Pound, divide that into crowns, half-crowns, shillings, sixpence, thrupence, tuppence, penny, ha'penny, fathings, half-farthings and, if that is not enough, quarter-farthings if we do.

No. Not when all money become a useless and arbitrary bartering system in a resource/energy(not monetary) based economy. It can't measure electricity by watts, food by nutritional facts, civilization by prosperity, health and wellness by freedom from diseases, human flourishing by humanity, nor sustainability by bio diversity. It's a cultural legacy of no intrinsic usefulness or value within the context of nature.

So, you want to get rid of money in general, and replace that with the redistribution of energy and resources? That would have to be on an international level, because countries, in general, do not produce all of the resources it needs. Who will be the one to decide the most efficient distribution? The government? Let us assume the government is in charge of all this, and that we elect the government, who is to say that we should be able to trust them? Or that there is someone more qualified to resdistribute weath than ourselves? But, say it works, and that there is a egality in the distribution, then how would the system cope with this human disire known as 'want'? For example, how would it cope with the 'I want this, and he has it'? Obviously, we can have a system where we make everyone into selfless caring people, either by trying to eliminate the greed they have through Fun-Camps and Friendly-Land, and then everyone will all be happy nice people who give what they have to someone else who wants it, and that person would carefully accept and will be able to do the same if given the chance, which bascially amounts to brainwashing, or we could barter our tangible resources, for example, fifty bushel of wheat and a door-nail, in exchange for other tangible resources, say Milton's Paradise Lost and Hustler's magazine issue 205. That depends on the existence of Reciprocated and Mutual desire, with both parties desiring what the other has, for example, I may want Milton and Hustler, but the other fellow may not want wheat or door nails. That is why we have money, because it eliminates the need of mutual and reciprocated desire for transaction, money, either commidity based or fiat based, has the property of being able to procure objects, and has the property of procuring object- that is, it is valid now, and can be valid in the future- though, that also depends on the confidence in the money's ability. Most Socialist, including the most famous, Charles Henry Marx (an anglicisation of his name, you may well note), have been wise enough to induce the utility of money within any economic system dependant the human emotion known as 'desire', that is, almost all economic system. Even at the most primitive level, desire is the core of all economic transaction. Then, if this problem does not exist, then there is the problem of how to get there. Do we go there immediately, and rush to where angels dare not tread, or do we arrive there in graduations.

Brainwashing? Well talk about your irony. When the fact is your false-positive superstition on mere "desire" as human nature, is but a naturalistic fallacy within the context of social psychology and neuroscience. When the fact is humans as social animals both desire and need the experience of belongingness, not mere material possession.

Belonging-ness as a Basic Need

Just as protein is needed in the diet for the health of the body, so belongingness is a basic need for the mind and soul. In the early years of the study of depth psychology, different innovators explored our “basic” motivations. Freud suggested sex and aggression as two key drives, Alfred Adler noted the seeking of the sense of superiority to counter inferiority feelings, and Jung noted a wide range of archetypal sources of motivation. Others also came up with their suggestions.

By the 1940s, though, child development research had considered another interesting disease that was prevalent again in orphanages, variously called "hospitalism," "anaclitic depression", or “marasmus," and describing the way some babies became sickly and often died! They traced this not to not being fed, but not being sufficiently cuddled, touched, played with! Other researchers supported the growing need for contact—and this in some ways was in contrast to a fashion in the child-rearing texts of the 1920s and 1930s to not pick up the crying child lest he be “spoiled.” (The success of the Doctor Spock books in the late 1940s was due to his challenging this anti-spoiling regiment. Benjamin Spock didn’t support “permissiveness” as his enemies accused, but simply not being harshly reserved.)

Psychoanalysts in the 1950s wove such research into revisions of theory, and while some stayed with Freud’s earlier “drive” theories, a fair number came to espouse what came to be called object relations theory. (This term refers to the object of a person’s love—and/or hate—, but many think of objects as inanimate, so the term is somewhat somewhat misleading; the theory itself seeks to highlight the intensity and depth of interpersonal relations.)

Much of object relations theory originally was based on observations about the interactions of infants and young children and their parents or caretakers, but what should be realized as that these early bonding experiences, with all their ups and downs, is only a small part of the richness of the dynamic! By age four to six, young children expand the scope of their worlds to include wider circles of friends, neighbors, and more abstract entities. Kids hear about and begin to root for the teams their parents root for, begin to relate to the family’s or communities myths about gods or spiritual entities, partake of ethnic identities, and feel patriotism and other sorts of loyalty. The term, belongingness, then, is more understandable and inclusive of our broader, more complex and life-long needs for feeling connected.(citation)

However, that human need for the experience of belongingness through social connection got highjacked by the psychotic corporate cultural practice of perception management from cradle to grave. AKA your "Fun-Camps" and "Friendly-Land" created by the corporations. When they basically socialized our children that in order for them to be worthy of belongingness, they need to possess their products, while compete in an arbitrary social hierarchy of vanity and shallowness.

Actually, I never said it is in man's nature to 'desire', but that desire, as in material desire, is the driving force of all economic transaction. Maybe there are people simply content with the satisfaction of 'Belonging'- whether to a community, a religion, a family, what ever, but, it is also true that some people have material want. It is not an illusion created by the corporations, material wants is what drove trade since the beginning of time, before the creation of corporations, before Capitalism, etc. But all this still avoids the question that I posit, how does your proposed system work? How does it overcome those limitations? How do we get to it? If it doesn't answer those question, it cannot work as an economic model.

The psychological dark triad of a personality continuum for narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy does predate the creation of corporations, governments, and capitalism as systems of modern society. When these ideas as dangerous memes are only the manifestos of said evil personalities, which later on became their own cultural legacies and social processes for evil.

The common thread running through all three traits of The Dark Triad (Machiavellianism, subclinical narcissism, and subclinical psychopathy) is high selfishness and low disagreeableness. Still, the three traits are only moderately correlated with one another, and recently researchers have started to assess the independent predictions of each separately from the others, and how people with a different balance of the Dark Triad go about obtaining their goals differently. For instance, recent research conducted by Peter Jonason, Glenn Geher, and myself suggests that narcissism is tied most heavily to extroversion and a desire to engage in social interactions whereas psychopathy is negatively related to extroversion.

Also of particular note is how each member of The Dark Triad is differentially related to different forms of impulsivity. Scott J. Dickman differentiates between two different forms of impulsivity: functional impulsivity and dysfunctional impulsivity. Functional impulsivity is related to idea generation, enthusiasm, adventurousness, and the ability to make quick decisions. On the other hand, dysfunctional impulsivity is related to erratic disorderliness, distraction, and inaccurate decision making.

To see how each of the members of The Dark Triad is related to impulsivity, Daniel N. Jones and Delroy L. Paulhus recently administered a battery of Dark Triad and impulsivity tests to 142 undergraduates as well as 329 adults in the community. Their measure of Psychopathy included four components: erratic lifestyle (e.g., "I am a rebellious person"), interpersonal manipulation (e.g., "I would get a kick out of 'scamming' someone"), callous affect ("e.g., "Most people are wimps"), and antisocial behavior (e.g., "I have tricked someone into giving me money"). They found that all four components of Psychopathy were extremely highly related to one another. Their measure of Machiavellianism included items such as "Anyone who completely trusts anyone else is asking for trouble" and their measure of narcissism included items such as "I like to be the center of attention". Finally, their measure of functional impulsivity included items such as "Most of the time, I can put my thoughts into words very rapidly", whereas their measure of dysfunctional impulsivity included items such as "I often get into trouble because I do not think before I act."

Even though the inter-correlations among the members of the Dark Triad were higher in the community sample, they found a similar pattern of results for both the student and community sample. Both narcissistic and psychopathic individuals tended to show higher levels of overall impulsivity. More telling though were correlations with the different types of impulsivity. Psychopathy was primarily associated with dysfunctional impulsivity, whereas narcissism was primarily related to functional impulsivity. Interestingly, Machavellianism was unrelated to either type of impulsivity.

According to the researchers, these results help explain why narcissism is a mixed blessing. In situations where accuracy is less important than speedy responses (e.g., short-term social interactions), functional impulsivity will be adaptive for narcissists. Over time, though, even functional impulsivity will start to show detrimental effects on interpersonal relationships.

The link between psychopathy and dysfunctional impulsivity is consistent with other research showing that psychopaths lack the ability to inhibit their antisocial impulses. The lack of relation between impulsivity and Machiavellianism is interesting and the researchers suggest that Machiavellian individuals may have an advantage over psychopaths and narcissists because their moderate impulse control may allow them to "refrain from counterproductive behaviors despite their selfish intentions".

The researchers conclude,

"Taken together, our two studies add to the accumulating evidence that the Dark Triad members have unique personality styles favoring different life outcomes. Each member has a unique social engagement style that might prove adaptive in some situations but maladaptive in others."

By studying beautiful minds as well as not-so beautiful minds, I think we can come to a more nuanced and richer understanding of human nature and the various paths by which people obtain their goals.(citation)

And it's exactly through the moral neutral that is our cultural legacy, where we can master the social process of empathy and altruism, starting with an education reform. Which Sir Ken Robinson had explained rather well in his TED Talk called Changing education paradigms. That "the problem is they are trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past." While "on the way they are alienating millions of kids who don't see any purpose in going to school."

I believe we need our children to surpass ourselves as future leaders in a global community, which means we need to cultivate them within a cultural legacy of leadership based on "listen, learn, then lead".

And you have to watch and take care of each other. I probably learned the most about relationships. I learned they are the sinew which hold the force together. I grew up much of my career in the Ranger regiment. And every morning in the Ranger regiment, every Ranger -- and there are more than 2,000 of them -- says a six-stanza Ranger creed. You may know one line of it, it says, "I'll never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy." And it's not a mindless mantra, and it's not a poem. It's a promise. Every Ranger promises every other Ranger now matter what happens, no matter what it costs me, if you need me, I'm coming. And every Ranger gets that same promise from every other Ranger. Think about it. It's extraordinarily powerful. It's probably more powerful than marriage vows. And they've lived up to it, which gives it special power. And so the organizational relationship that bonds them is just amazing.

And I learned personal relationships were more important than ever. We were in a difficult operation in Afghanistan in 2007, and an old friend of mine, that I had spent many years at various points of my career with -- godfather to one of their kids -- he sent me a note, just in an envelope, that had a quote from Sherman to Grant that said, "I knew if I ever got in a tight spot, that you would come, if alive." And having that kind of relationship, for me, turned out to be critical at many points in my career.

And I learned that you have to give that in this environment, because it's tough. That was my journey. I hope it's not over. I came to believe that a leader isn't good because they're right; they're good because they're willing to learn and to trust. This isn't easy stuff. It's not like that electronic abs machine where, 15 minutes a month, you get washboard abs. And it isn't always fair. You can get knocked down, and it hurts and it leaves scars. But if you're a leader, the people you've counted on will help you up. And if you're a leader, the people who count on you need you on your feet.(citation)

That's not cultural legacy grounded in academics, but rather it's about ethics and empathy. Which is rightfully so considering the next revolutionary shift in learning global politics through complex, engaging, and dynamic "World Peace" game.

And so this World Peace Game I'd like to tell you about. It started out like this: it's just a four-foot by five-foot plywood board in an inner-city urban school, 1978. I was creating a lesson for students on Africa. We put all the problems of the world there, and I thought, let's let them solve it. I didn't want to lecture or have just book reading. I wanted to have them be immersed and learn the feeling of learning through their bodies. So I thought, well they like to play games. I'll make something -- I didn't say interactive. We didn't have that term in 1978 -- but something interactive. And so we made the game, and it has since evolved to a four-foot by four-foot by four-foot Plexiglass structure. And it has four Plexiglass layers.

There's an outer space layer with black holes and satellites and research satellites and asteroid mining. There's an air and space level with clouds that are big puffs of cotton we push around and territorial air spaces and air forces, a ground and sea level with thousands of game pieces on it -- even an undersea level with submarines and undersea mining. There are four countries around the board. The kids make up the names of the countries -- some are rich some are poor. They have different assets, commercial and military. And each country has a cabinet. There's a prime minister, secretary of state, minister of defense and a CFO, or comptroller. I choose the prime minister based on my relationship with them. I offer them the job, they can turn it down, and then they choose their own cabinet. There's a World Bank, arms dealers and a United Nations. There's also a weather goddess who controls a random stock market and random weather.

That's not all. And then there's a 13-page crisis document with 50 interlocking problems. So that, if one thing changes, everything else changes. I throw them into this complex matrix, and they trust me because we have a deep, rich relationship together. And so with all these crises, we have -- let's see -- ethnic and minority tensions; we have chemical and nuclear spills, nuclear proliferation. There's oil spills, environmental disasters, water rights disputes, breakaway republics, famine, endangered species and global warming. If Al Gore is here, I'm going to send my fourth-graders from Agnor-Hurt and Venable school to you because they solved global warming in a week. And they've done it several times too.

So I also have in the game a saboteur -- some child -- it's basically a troublemaker -- and I have my troublemaker put to use because they, on the surface, are trying to save the world and their position in the game. But they're also trying to undermine everything in the game. And they do it secretly through misinformation and ambiguities and irrelevancies, trying to cause everyone to think more deeply. The saboteur is there, and we also read from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War." Fourth-graders understand it -- nine years old -- and they handle that and use that to understand how to, not follow -- at first they do -- the paths to power and destruction, the path to war. They learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking, to think in a long-term, more consequential way.(citation)

So that's one example of how to cultivate ethics and empathy within children through self-guided social gaming. But what about academic learning that's insofar had always been done in a dehumanizing, individualistic, and atomized environment? Well one Salman Khan has an interesting and innovative alternative in his TED Talk called Let's use video to reinvent education.

The other thing that happened -- and even at this point, I said, "Okay, maybe it's a good supplement. It's good for motivated students. It's good for maybe home schoolers." But I didn't think it would be something that would somehow penetrate the classroom. But then I started getting letters from teachers. And the teachers would write, saying, "We use your videos to flip the classroom. You've given the lectures, so now what we do ... " and this could happen in every classroom in America tomorrow, " ... what I do is I assign the lectures for homework. And what used to be homework, I now have the students doing in the classroom."

And I want to pause here for a second, because there's a couple of interesting things. One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit -- the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did. They can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. But the more interesting thing is -- and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom -- by removing the one size fits all lecture from the classroom and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, and then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom. They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience -- 30 kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other. A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one size fits all lecture to 30 students -- blank faces, slightly antagonistic -- and now it's a human experience. Now they're actually interacting with each other.

So once the Khan Academy -- I quit my job and we turned into a real organization -- we're a not-for-profit -- the question is, how do we take this to the next level? How do we take what those teachers are doing to their natural conclusion? And so what I'm showing you over here, these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins. The ones I started were much more primitive. This is a more competent version of it. But the paradigm here is, we'll generate as many questions as you need until you get that concept, until you get 10 in a row. And the Khan Academy videos are there. You get hints, the actual steps for that problem, if you don't know how to do it. But the paradigm here, it seems like a very simple thing: 10 in a row, you move on. But it's fundamentally different than what's happening in classrooms right now.

In a traditional classroom, you have a couple of homework, homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. And that exam, whether you get a 70 percent, an 80 percent, a 90 percent, or a 95 percent, the class moves on to the next topic. And even that 95 percent student, what was the five percent they didn't know? Maybe they didn't know what happens when you raise something to the zero power. And then you go build on that in the next concept. That's analogous to imagine learning to ride a bicycle, and maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time, and I give you that bicycle for two weeks. And then I come back after two weeks, and I say, "Well, let's see. You're having trouble taking left turns. You can't quite stop. You're an 80 percent bicyclist." So I put a big C stamp on your forehead and then I say, "Here's a unicycle." But as ridiculous as that sounds, that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now. And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of a sudden and start failing calculus all of a sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers. And it's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation. So our model is learn math the way you'd learn anything, like the way you would learn a bicycle. Stay on that bicycle. Fall off that bicycle. Do it as long as necessary until you have mastery. The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to failure. But we do expect mastery.

This is just another one of the modules. This is trigonometry. This is shifting and reflecting functions. And they all fit together. We have about 90 of these right now. And you can go to the site right now. It's all free. Not trying to sell anything. But the general idea is that they all fit into this knowledge map. That top node right there, that's literally single digit addition. It's like one plus one is equal to two. And the paradigm is, once you get 10 in a row on that, it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules. So if you keep further down the knowledge map, we're getting into more advanced arithmetic. Further down, you start getting into pre-algebra and early algebra. Further down, you start getting into algebra one, algebra two, a little bit of precalculus. And the idea is, from this we can actually teach everything -- well, everything that can be taught in this type of a framework. So you can imagine -- and this is what we are working on -- is from this knowledge map you have logic, you have computer programming, you have grammar, you have genetics, all based off of that core of, if you know this and that, now you're ready for this next concept. Now that can work well for an individual learner, and I encourage, one, for you to do it with your kids, but I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself. It'll change what happens at the dinner table.

But what we want to do is to use the natural conclusion of the flipping of the classroom that those early teachers had emailed me about. And so what I'm showing you here, this is actually data from a pilot in the Los Altos school district, where they took two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes and completely gutted their old math curriculum. These kids aren't using textbooks, they're not getting one size fits all lectures. They're doing Khan Academy, they're doing that software, for roughly half of their math class. And I want to make it clear, we don't view this as the complete math education. What it does is -- and this is what's happening in Los Altos -- it frees up time. This is the blocking and tackling, making sure you know how to move through a system of equations, and it frees up time for the simulations, for the games, for the mechanics, for the robot building, for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow.

And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day, every kid works at their own pace -- and this is actually a live dashboard from Los Altos school district -- and they look at this dashboard. Every row is a student. Every column is one of those concepts. Green means the student's already proficient. Blue means they're working on it -- no need to worry. Red means they're stuck. And what the teacher does is literally just say, "Let me intervene on the red kids." Or even better, "Let me get one of the green kids who are already proficient in that concept to be the first line of attack and actually tutor their peer."

Now I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "Oh, what do you not understand?" or "What do you do understand?" and all of the rest. So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers with as much data as possible -- really data that, in almost any other field, is expected, if you're in finance or marketing or manufacturing. And so the teachers can actually diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible. So now the teachers know exactly what the students have been up to, how long they have been spending every day, what videos have they been watching, when did they pause the videos, what did they stop watching, what exercises are they using, what have they been focused on? The outer circle shows what exercises they were focused on. The inner circle shows what videos they're focused on. And the data gets pretty granular so you can see the exact problems that the student got right or wrong. Red is wrong, blue is right. The leftmost question is the first question that the student attempted. They watched the video right over there. And then you can see, eventually, they were able to get 10 in a row. It's almost like you can see them learning over those last 10 problems. They also got faster. The height is how long it took them.

So when you talk about self-paced learning, it makes sense for everyone -- in education-speak, differentiated learning -- but it's kind of crazy when you see it in a classroom. Because every time we've done this, in every classroom we've done, over and over again, if you go five days into it, there's a group of kids who've raced ahead and there's a group of kids who are a little bit slower. And in a traditional model, if you did a snapshot assessment, you say, "These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids. Maybe they should be tracked differently. Maybe we should put them in different classes." But when you let every student work at their own pace -- and we see it over and over and over again -- you see students who took a little bit extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead. And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted. And we're seeing it over and over and over again. And it makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefitted from were really just due to a coincidence of time.

Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale, what's happening in education. And actually, that kind of brings an interesting point. A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom is focused on student-to-teacher ratios. In our mind, the relevant metric is student-to-valuable-human-time- with-the-teacher ratio. So in a traditional model, most of the teacher's time is spent giving lectures and grading and whatnot. Maybe five percent of their time is actually sitting next to students and actually working with them. Now 100 percent of their time is. So once again, using technology, not just flipping the classroom, you're humanizing the classroom, I'd argue, by a factor of five or 10.(citation)

By now I hope that some of you might have spotted the pattern of how a resource-based development process is emerging from this real-time data-centric, yet humane and sociable learning experience. And how smoothly they all integrate into the human intrinsic motivators of autonomy through self-paced lectures, mastery through peer-support, and propose through community/team building technologies.

Finally, this abundance of genuine human capital and intellectual surplus can transform our world through open-source economy. When economic growth had always based on the carrying capacity of the Earth's finite and renewable resources to generate energysurpluses. Not fiat money as debt with interest. And while we've already went beyond peak oil, our civilization has yet to progress itself beyond its oil dependency. Moreover, our prosperity is based on the sustainability and energy efficiency of our complex culture. And not the preservation of a monetary system that creates money out of thin air.

So, you answer to curb the natural self-interest of some is the indoctrination of all? The process seems to be, first, that they must listen closely to their teacher- reasonable- then, they must submit themselves to his ideas, and then they must apply what they submitted themselves to. Take the world peace affair you have mentioned- lenghtily- the student must first listen with awe at their teacher, submit themselves to his wise commands, let him choose a leader among thier pseudo-micronation, submit themselves to the establishment he has establish, then lead and live within the establishment that he created. I cannot say that I am totally convinced of this system to instill the values of virtue, charity, altruism, and honesty in our children, mainly because, when press to accept a value, I have no doubt that some will rebel, and stray far into the other direction.

This dungeon, for it is thus, would not instill the necessary values that is needed to all children for this to work. Being so, and shedding the individual for the community, let us ignore the obvious difficulty of overhaulling an overhaul of our educational system and turning to something more akin to forcing Children to pledge themselves to the Motherland and the Government- or the T'sar, or the Emperor, or that stand in of the government, the Flag- than something that promotes anything genuinely intelligent. You suppose that we should base our economy on Energy- where does "Want" play in? Even the best of us have wants- and many of us have wants beyond the simple feeling of community or spirituality- I have energy and food (pretend we already figured out how to effectively distribute them in the best possible way and in the most efficient possible manner), how would my desire for something else get satisfied? Do we barter- the problem has already been discussed in more detail previously- or, more likely, do we turn to money? Do we have a commodity monetary unit- what should it be? Food and Energy? Certainly, if we are in a community with sufficient Food and Energy, even if we have finally figured out a way to trade energy, we would have no want of it, because there is sufficient amount of it, and it is completely valueless because it is so abundant. Maybe I am interpreting it all wrong, and thus, I am not convinced of its merit. Maybe there is something that I have missed, and, should I see it more clearly, I would be absolutely convinced. Maybe I need it put in more lucid language. No matter, I am still unconvinced.

The part in red might jog your interest. Until then, you can try to argue how the natural self-interest for human beings as themselves social animals, within the context of social science and neuroscience, isn'tbelongingness.

The two proposed solution, as far as I understand it, to America's unemployment, and correct me if I am wrong, seems to be:

a) Stimulate the Economy by printing and throwing as much money as possible at the economy, and hope that, by increasing the amount of money avaliable, people will purchase, creating demand, and thus creating jobs to supply those demands. Because America is so patriotic that people only buy American, even when faced with cheaper Indian, Vietnamese, or Chinese products. This is the policy, I think, our judicious leaders have taken.

b) Let the market regulate itself, because workers will, when faced with unemployment, accept lower wages, and companies will hire them all, even if there is no demand for their product, and we are restored to that happy and blissful seat- in short, it is the best of all possible worlds, and everything lines to create the best of all possible endings.

What do you think is the right policy our nation should take in such a crisis as this?

A. would lead to inflation, last thing we need is for the price of meat to go from 5.99$ To 9.99$. this will force more people out of work....not fix anything. B. woulld be a better choice of the twobut there is better choices. 1 being the removal of most goverment programs the cost the tax payers... next would be to invest in companies that can make money through trade with other countries. As A scientist i will point out inclosed systems fail. the same goes for communities and governments.

Have you not heard of the magical Phillip's curve?

During the late fifties, British economist A.W. Phillips empirically stumbled upon an inverse relationship between unemployment and wages after plotting the figure on a graph. Economist soon realise that this relationship could be found everywhere, and soon, they connected that with inflation and a nifty explaination- as employment rise, the strenght of the labourers is greater, thus, they can raise wages. But the employers realising that this would make them less profit, would raise prices, and the workers, again, realising that this would in fact make their new gain in higher wages not really exist (if prices go up, and wage goes up in the same proportion, there is no gain) if this happens, so they go back to the table, &c. and soon, this will lead to inflation. Likewise, when there is unemployment, deflation occurs because, there being less workers, the workers are willing to work for lower wages, prices will drop, and deflation occurs. Thus, it falls to reason that there is a trade-off between inflation and employment- at least in the short term. The solution is then is to create short term inflation to stimulate the economy, create employment, &c. &c. By creating more money, the people would have more spending power, which will lead to greater purchase, and more demand. So, in effect, the government, in respect to their recent Stimulus and their printing of money, have giant lump of bronze, and they hope that it will seperate itself into copper and tin. Of course, I am no economist, and my explanation may be completely incorrect.

There's at least two problems with that "creating more money" process, when a fiat currency like the US Dollars is made of debt: one is the real physical limitation of our planet's carrying capacity simply cannot sustain an infinite growth.

These monetary learnings allow us to formulate two more extremely important Key Concepts.

The first is that all dollars are backed by debt. At the local bank level, all new money is loaned into existence. At the Federal Reserve level, money is simply manufactured out of thin air and then exchanged for interest-paying government debt. In both cases, the money is backed by debt. Debt that pays interest. From this Key Concept, we can formulate a truly profound statement, which is that at a minimum, each year enough new money must be loaned into existence to cover the interest payments on all of the past outstanding debt.

If we flip this slightly, we can say that each year all the outstanding debt must compound by at least the rate of the interest on that debt. Each and every year it must grow by some percentage. Because our debt-based money system is growing by some percentage continually, it is an exponential system by its very design. A corollary of this is that the amount of debt in the system will always exceed the amount of money.

I am not going to cast judgment on this and say that it is good or it is bad. It simply is what it is. By understanding its design, though, you will be better equipped to understand that the potential range of future outcomes for our economy are not limitless, but rather bounded by the rules of the system.

All of which leads us to the fourth Key Concept, which is that perpetual expansion is a requirement of modern banking. In fact we can make a rule: Each year, new credit (loans) must be made that at least equal the amount of all the outstanding interest payments that year. Without a continuous expansion of the money supply, past debts would not be able to be serviced, and defaults would ripple through, and possibly destroy, the entire system. Defaults are the Achilles heel of a debt-based money system, which we saw in our local banking example in the previous chapter. Because of this, all the institutional and political forces in our society are geared towards avoiding this outcome.

So the banking system must continually expand – not necessarily because it is the right (or wrong) thing to do, but, rather, simply because that is how it was designed. It is a feature of the system, just like using gasoline is a feature of my car’s engine. I might wish and hope that my car would run on straw, but I’d be wasting my time, because that’s just not how it was designed.

By understanding the requirement for continual expansion, we will be in a better position to make informed decisions about what’s likely to transpire and take meaningful actions to enhance our prospects.

More philosophically, we might wonder about the long-term viability of a system that must expand exponentially but which exists on a spherical planet. The key question is, “Can our current money system somehow be modified to be stable, fair, and useful when it is not growing?”

So the question is this: What happens when a human-contrived money system that must expand, by its very design, runs headlong into the physical limits of a spherical planet?(citation)

And two is the historical destruction of the currency itself due to hyperinflation.

It is crucially important that a nation’s money supply is carefully managed, for if it is not, the monetary unit can be destroyed by inflation. In fact, there are over 3,800 past examples of paper currencies that no longer exist. There are numerous examples from the United States, which may have some collector value but no longer possess any monetary value. Of course, I could just as easily display beautiful but no longer functional examples from Argentina, Bolivia, and Columbia, and a hundred other places

How does a hyperinflationary destruction of a currency happen?

Here’s a relatively recent example that comes from Yugoslavia between the years 1988 and 1995. Pre-1990, the Yugoslavian dinar had measurable value: You could actually buy something with one. However, throughout the 1980’s, the Yugoslavian government ran a persistent budget deficit and printed money to make up the shortfall. By the early 1990’s, the government had used up all its own hard currency reserves, and they proceeded to loot the private accounts of citizens. In order to keep things moving along, successively larger bills had to be printed, finally culminating in this stunning example – a 500 billion dinar note. At its height, inflation in Yugoslavia was running at over 37% per day. This means prices were doubling every 48 hours or so.

Let me see if I can make that more concrete for you. Suppose that on January 1, 2007, you had a penny and could find something to purchase with it. At 37% per day inflation, by April 3, 2007 you’d need one of these – a billion dollar bill – to purchase the very same item. In reverse, if you’d had a billion dollars on January 1st stuffed in a suitcase, by April 3rd you’d have had a penny’s worth of purchasing power left.

Clearly, if you’d attempted to save money during this period of time, you’d have lost it all, so we can safely state that inflationary money regimes impose a penalty on savers. The opposite side of this is that inflationary money regimes promote spending and require that money be invested or speculated, so as to at least have the chance of keeping pace with inflation. Of course, investing and speculating involve risks, so we can broaden this statement to include the claim that inflationary monetary systems require the citizens living within them to subject their hard-earned savings to risk.

That is worth pondering for a minute or two.

Even more importantly, since history shows how common it is for currencies to be mismanaged, we need to keep a careful eye on the stewards of our money to make sure they are not being irresponsible by creating too much money out of thin air and thereby destroying our savings, culture, and institutions by the process of inflation.(citation)

That's why a fiat currency is doomed to fail by its very design. And now with electronic payment system, hyperinflation can run its course without relying on printing large bills.

Jacob Goldstein: Because now, if you think of most of the money that you have, or most of the money that I have, it's never currency. I get paid. That is just a direct deposit from NPR, from my employer, to my checking account. It's not like they give me a bunch of hundred dollar bills every week. And then, I pay my bills online. So currency even now is like old-fashioned. You don't have to touch money. You don't have to see it. It's just information.Money is just an abstract and arbitrary made-belief, there's no intrinsic value in a fiat currency we use in the modern world.

Ira Glass: Until this conversation it never occurred to me that money doesn't change hands when we pay our bills online or anything. Like I don't know why I never even stopped to think, right, at no point does the bank go and deliver like $100 to the phone company on my behalf. It really is just numbers going back and forth in the computer.

Jacob Goldstein: Yeah. Nothing happens in the physical world. I mean I guess, except electrical pulses I guess it would be flying back and forth between computers. The money doesn't really exist. Not only is there no gold. There aren't even bills for most of the money that exists. Most of the money that exists is just the idea. It's just the bank saying, yes, there is this much money in your account.(citation)

So in conclusion, Money is just an abstract and arbitrary made-belief, there's no intrinsic value in a fiat currency we use in the modern world. But we're all made to believe that it's somehow important.

The two proposed solution, as far as I understand it, to America's unemployment, and correct me if I am wrong, seems to be:

a) Stimulate the Economy by printing and throwing as much money as possible at the economy, and hope that, by increasing the amount of money avaliable, people will purchase, creating demand, and thus creating jobs to supply those demands. Because America is so patriotic that people only buy American, even when faced with cheaper Indian, Vietnamese, or Chinese products. This is the policy, I think, our judicious leaders have taken.

b) Let the market regulate itself, because workers will, when faced with unemployment, accept lower wages, and companies will hire them all, even if there is no demand for their product, and we are restored to that happy and blissful seat- in short, it is the best of all possible worlds, and everything lines to create the best of all possible endings.

What do you think is the right policy our nation should take in such a crisis as this?

If only people would just see through the entertainment buzz, without themselves being indoctrinated into believing that it's somehow a dirty word. Then hopefully they would realize for themselves that socialism is about establishing an egalitarian society.

So, you would rather us go back to the Gold Standard or to a Commidity Currency system instead of our current Fiat system? I am not quite sure that getting rid of the Fiat Currency, which is simply money which the Government insures is legal tender, would be all that beneficial, being that Gold back currency would deflate the dollar to the point where, while it is worth much more, it is less competitive than- say- every other Fiat currency in the world, that is, every other currency in the world. Let us say we go back to backing our money with Gold, say, at the Bretton-Woods' 35 dollar for every ounce, Gold is, as of today, worth at around 1800$. That would make a single of our hypothetical dollar worth around 50 of our current dollar, and a single hypothetical cent worth around fifty cents. And, because there is only a limited supply of Gold in our Goverment treasury, Money becomes even more scarce. I do not think that massive deflation is the way to go. We may as well go back to the Pound, divide that into crowns, half-crowns, shillings, sixpence, thrupence, tuppence, penny, ha'penny, fathings, half-farthings and, if that is not enough, quarter-farthings if we do.

No. Not when all money become a useless and arbitrary bartering system in a resource/energy(not monetary) based economy. It can't measure electricity by watts, food by nutritional facts, civilization by prosperity, health and wellness by freedom from diseases, human flourishing by humanity, nor sustainability by bio diversity. It's a cultural legacy of no intrinsic usefulness or value within the context of nature.

So, you want to get rid of money in general, and replace that with the redistribution of energy and resources? That would have to be on an international level, because countries, in general, do not produce all of the resources it needs. Who will be the one to decide the most efficient distribution? The government? Let us assume the government is in charge of all this, and that we elect the government, who is to say that we should be able to trust them? Or that there is someone more qualified to resdistribute weath than ourselves? But, say it works, and that there is a egality in the distribution, then how would the system cope with this human disire known as 'want'? For example, how would it cope with the 'I want this, and he has it'? Obviously, we can have a system where we make everyone into selfless caring people, either by trying to eliminate the greed they have through Fun-Camps and Friendly-Land, and then everyone will all be happy nice people who give what they have to someone else who wants it, and that person would carefully accept and will be able to do the same if given the chance, which bascially amounts to brainwashing, or we could barter our tangible resources, for example, fifty bushel of wheat and a door-nail, in exchange for other tangible resources, say Milton's Paradise Lost and Hustler's magazine issue 205. That depends on the existence of Reciprocated and Mutual desire, with both parties desiring what the other has, for example, I may want Milton and Hustler, but the other fellow may not want wheat or door nails. That is why we have money, because it eliminates the need of mutual and reciprocated desire for transaction, money, either commidity based or fiat based, has the property of being able to procure objects, and has the property of procuring object- that is, it is valid now, and can be valid in the future- though, that also depends on the confidence in the money's ability. Most Socialist, including the most famous, Charles Henry Marx (an anglicisation of his name, you may well note), have been wise enough to induce the utility of money within any economic system dependant the human emotion known as 'desire', that is, almost all economic system. Even at the most primitive level, desire is the core of all economic transaction. Then, if this problem does not exist, then there is the problem of how to get there. Do we go there immediately, and rush to where angels dare not tread, or do we arrive there in graduations.

Brainwashing? Well talk about your irony. When the fact is your false-positive superstition on mere "desire" as human nature, is but a naturalistic fallacy within the context of social psychology and neuroscience. When the fact is humans as social animals both desire and need the experience of belongingness, not mere material possession.

Belonging-ness as a Basic Need

Just as protein is needed in the diet for the health of the body, so belongingness is a basic need for the mind and soul. In the early years of the study of depth psychology, different innovators explored our “basic” motivations. Freud suggested sex and aggression as two key drives, Alfred Adler noted the seeking of the sense of superiority to counter inferiority feelings, and Jung noted a wide range of archetypal sources of motivation. Others also came up with their suggestions.

By the 1940s, though, child development research had considered another interesting disease that was prevalent again in orphanages, variously called "hospitalism," "anaclitic depression", or “marasmus," and describing the way some babies became sickly and often died! They traced this not to not being fed, but not being sufficiently cuddled, touched, played with! Other researchers supported the growing need for contact—and this in some ways was in contrast to a fashion in the child-rearing texts of the 1920s and 1930s to not pick up the crying child lest he be “spoiled.” (The success of the Doctor Spock books in the late 1940s was due to his challenging this anti-spoiling regiment. Benjamin Spock didn’t support “permissiveness” as his enemies accused, but simply not being harshly reserved.)

Psychoanalysts in the 1950s wove such research into revisions of theory, and while some stayed with Freud’s earlier “drive” theories, a fair number came to espouse what came to be called object relations theory. (This term refers to the object of a person’s love—and/or hate—, but many think of objects as inanimate, so the term is somewhat somewhat misleading; the theory itself seeks to highlight the intensity and depth of interpersonal relations.)

Much of object relations theory originally was based on observations about the interactions of infants and young children and their parents or caretakers, but what should be realized as that these early bonding experiences, with all their ups and downs, is only a small part of the richness of the dynamic! By age four to six, young children expand the scope of their worlds to include wider circles of friends, neighbors, and more abstract entities. Kids hear about and begin to root for the teams their parents root for, begin to relate to the family’s or communities myths about gods or spiritual entities, partake of ethnic identities, and feel patriotism and other sorts of loyalty. The term, belongingness, then, is more understandable and inclusive of our broader, more complex and life-long needs for feeling connected.(citation)

However, that human need for the experience of belongingness through social connection got highjacked by the psychotic corporate cultural practice of perception management from cradle to grave. AKA your "Fun-Camps" and "Friendly-Land" created by the corporations. When they basically socialized our children that in order for them to be worthy of belongingness, they need to possess their products, while compete in an arbitrary social hierarchy of vanity and shallowness.

Actually, I never said it is in man's nature to 'desire', but that desire, as in material desire, is the driving force of all economic transaction. Maybe there are people simply content with the satisfaction of 'Belonging'- whether to a community, a religion, a family, what ever, but, it is also true that some people have material want. It is not an illusion created by the corporations, material wants is what drove trade since the beginning of time, before the creation of corporations, before Capitalism, etc. But all this still avoids the question that I posit, how does your proposed system work? How does it overcome those limitations? How do we get to it? If it doesn't answer those question, it cannot work as an economic model.

The psychological dark triad of a personality continuum for narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy does predate the creation of corporations, governments, and capitalism as systems of modern society. When these ideas as dangerous memes are only the manifestos of said evil personalities, which later on became their own cultural legacies and social processes for evil.

The common thread running through all three traits of The Dark Triad (Machiavellianism, subclinical narcissism, and subclinical psychopathy) is high selfishness and low disagreeableness. Still, the three traits are only moderately correlated with one another, and recently researchers have started to assess the independent predictions of each separately from the others, and how people with a different balance of the Dark Triad go about obtaining their goals differently. For instance, recent research conducted by Peter Jonason, Glenn Geher, and myself suggests that narcissism is tied most heavily to extroversion and a desire to engage in social interactions whereas psychopathy is negatively related to extroversion.

Also of particular note is how each member of The Dark Triad is differentially related to different forms of impulsivity. Scott J. Dickman differentiates between two different forms of impulsivity: functional impulsivity and dysfunctional impulsivity. Functional impulsivity is related to idea generation, enthusiasm, adventurousness, and the ability to make quick decisions. On the other hand, dysfunctional impulsivity is related to erratic disorderliness, distraction, and inaccurate decision making.

To see how each of the members of The Dark Triad is related to impulsivity, Daniel N. Jones and Delroy L. Paulhus recently administered a battery of Dark Triad and impulsivity tests to 142 undergraduates as well as 329 adults in the community. Their measure of Psychopathy included four components: erratic lifestyle (e.g., "I am a rebellious person"), interpersonal manipulation (e.g., "I would get a kick out of 'scamming' someone"), callous affect ("e.g., "Most people are wimps"), and antisocial behavior (e.g., "I have tricked someone into giving me money"). They found that all four components of Psychopathy were extremely highly related to one another. Their measure of Machiavellianism included items such as "Anyone who completely trusts anyone else is asking for trouble" and their measure of narcissism included items such as "I like to be the center of attention". Finally, their measure of functional impulsivity included items such as "Most of the time, I can put my thoughts into words very rapidly", whereas their measure of dysfunctional impulsivity included items such as "I often get into trouble because I do not think before I act."

Even though the inter-correlations among the members of the Dark Triad were higher in the community sample, they found a similar pattern of results for both the student and community sample. Both narcissistic and psychopathic individuals tended to show higher levels of overall impulsivity. More telling though were correlations with the different types of impulsivity. Psychopathy was primarily associated with dysfunctional impulsivity, whereas narcissism was primarily related to functional impulsivity. Interestingly, Machavellianism was unrelated to either type of impulsivity.

According to the researchers, these results help explain why narcissism is a mixed blessing. In situations where accuracy is less important than speedy responses (e.g., short-term social interactions), functional impulsivity will be adaptive for narcissists. Over time, though, even functional impulsivity will start to show detrimental effects on interpersonal relationships.

The link between psychopathy and dysfunctional impulsivity is consistent with other research showing that psychopaths lack the ability to inhibit their antisocial impulses. The lack of relation between impulsivity and Machiavellianism is interesting and the researchers suggest that Machiavellian individuals may have an advantage over psychopaths and narcissists because their moderate impulse control may allow them to "refrain from counterproductive behaviors despite their selfish intentions".

The researchers conclude,

"Taken together, our two studies add to the accumulating evidence that the Dark Triad members have unique personality styles favoring different life outcomes. Each member has a unique social engagement style that might prove adaptive in some situations but maladaptive in others."

By studying beautiful minds as well as not-so beautiful minds, I think we can come to a more nuanced and richer understanding of human nature and the various paths by which people obtain their goals.(citation)

And it's exactly through the moral neutral that is our cultural legacy, where we can master the social process of empathy and altruism, starting with an education reform. Which Sir Ken Robinson had explained rather well in his TED Talk called Changing education paradigms. That "the problem is they are trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past." While "on the way they are alienating millions of kids who don't see any purpose in going to school."

I believe we need our children to surpass ourselves as future leaders in a global community, which means we need to cultivate them within a cultural legacy of leadership based on "listen, learn, then lead".

And you have to watch and take care of each other. I probably learned the most about relationships. I learned they are the sinew which hold the force together. I grew up much of my career in the Ranger regiment. And every morning in the Ranger regiment, every Ranger -- and there are more than 2,000 of them -- says a six-stanza Ranger creed. You may know one line of it, it says, "I'll never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy." And it's not a mindless mantra, and it's not a poem. It's a promise. Every Ranger promises every other Ranger now matter what happens, no matter what it costs me, if you need me, I'm coming. And every Ranger gets that same promise from every other Ranger. Think about it. It's extraordinarily powerful. It's probably more powerful than marriage vows. And they've lived up to it, which gives it special power. And so the organizational relationship that bonds them is just amazing.

And I learned personal relationships were more important than ever. We were in a difficult operation in Afghanistan in 2007, and an old friend of mine, that I had spent many years at various points of my career with -- godfather to one of their kids -- he sent me a note, just in an envelope, that had a quote from Sherman to Grant that said, "I knew if I ever got in a tight spot, that you would come, if alive." And having that kind of relationship, for me, turned out to be critical at many points in my career.

And I learned that you have to give that in this environment, because it's tough. That was my journey. I hope it's not over. I came to believe that a leader isn't good because they're right; they're good because they're willing to learn and to trust. This isn't easy stuff. It's not like that electronic abs machine where, 15 minutes a month, you get washboard abs. And it isn't always fair. You can get knocked down, and it hurts and it leaves scars. But if you're a leader, the people you've counted on will help you up. And if you're a leader, the people who count on you need you on your feet.(citation)

That's not cultural legacy grounded in academics, but rather it's about ethics and empathy. Which is rightfully so considering the next revolutionary shift in learning global politics through complex, engaging, and dynamic "World Peace" game.

And so this World Peace Game I'd like to tell you about. It started out like this: it's just a four-foot by five-foot plywood board in an inner-city urban school, 1978. I was creating a lesson for students on Africa. We put all the problems of the world there, and I thought, let's let them solve it. I didn't want to lecture or have just book reading. I wanted to have them be immersed and learn the feeling of learning through their bodies. So I thought, well they like to play games. I'll make something -- I didn't say interactive. We didn't have that term in 1978 -- but something interactive. And so we made the game, and it has since evolved to a four-foot by four-foot by four-foot Plexiglass structure. And it has four Plexiglass layers.

There's an outer space layer with black holes and satellites and research satellites and asteroid mining. There's an air and space level with clouds that are big puffs of cotton we push around and territorial air spaces and air forces, a ground and sea level with thousands of game pieces on it -- even an undersea level with submarines and undersea mining. There are four countries around the board. The kids make up the names of the countries -- some are rich some are poor. They have different assets, commercial and military. And each country has a cabinet. There's a prime minister, secretary of state, minister of defense and a CFO, or comptroller. I choose the prime minister based on my relationship with them. I offer them the job, they can turn it down, and then they choose their own cabinet. There's a World Bank, arms dealers and a United Nations. There's also a weather goddess who controls a random stock market and random weather.

That's not all. And then there's a 13-page crisis document with 50 interlocking problems. So that, if one thing changes, everything else changes. I throw them into this complex matrix, and they trust me because we have a deep, rich relationship together. And so with all these crises, we have -- let's see -- ethnic and minority tensions; we have chemical and nuclear spills, nuclear proliferation. There's oil spills, environmental disasters, water rights disputes, breakaway republics, famine, endangered species and global warming. If Al Gore is here, I'm going to send my fourth-graders from Agnor-Hurt and Venable school to you because they solved global warming in a week. And they've done it several times too.

So I also have in the game a saboteur -- some child -- it's basically a troublemaker -- and I have my troublemaker put to use because they, on the surface, are trying to save the world and their position in the game. But they're also trying to undermine everything in the game. And they do it secretly through misinformation and ambiguities and irrelevancies, trying to cause everyone to think more deeply. The saboteur is there, and we also read from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War." Fourth-graders understand it -- nine years old -- and they handle that and use that to understand how to, not follow -- at first they do -- the paths to power and destruction, the path to war. They learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking, to think in a long-term, more consequential way.(citation)

So that's one example of how to cultivate ethics and empathy within children through self-guided social gaming. But what about academic learning that's insofar had always been done in a dehumanizing, individualistic, and atomized environment? Well one Salman Khan has an interesting and innovative alternative in his TED Talk called Let's use video to reinvent education.

The other thing that happened -- and even at this point, I said, "Okay, maybe it's a good supplement. It's good for motivated students. It's good for maybe home schoolers." But I didn't think it would be something that would somehow penetrate the classroom. But then I started getting letters from teachers. And the teachers would write, saying, "We use your videos to flip the classroom. You've given the lectures, so now what we do ... " and this could happen in every classroom in America tomorrow, " ... what I do is I assign the lectures for homework. And what used to be homework, I now have the students doing in the classroom."

And I want to pause here for a second, because there's a couple of interesting things. One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit -- the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did. They can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. But the more interesting thing is -- and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom -- by removing the one size fits all lecture from the classroom and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, and then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom. They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience -- 30 kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other. A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one size fits all lecture to 30 students -- blank faces, slightly antagonistic -- and now it's a human experience. Now they're actually interacting with each other.

So once the Khan Academy -- I quit my job and we turned into a real organization -- we're a not-for-profit -- the question is, how do we take this to the next level? How do we take what those teachers are doing to their natural conclusion? And so what I'm showing you over here, these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins. The ones I started were much more primitive. This is a more competent version of it. But the paradigm here is, we'll generate as many questions as you need until you get that concept, until you get 10 in a row. And the Khan Academy videos are there. You get hints, the actual steps for that problem, if you don't know how to do it. But the paradigm here, it seems like a very simple thing: 10 in a row, you move on. But it's fundamentally different than what's happening in classrooms right now.

In a traditional classroom, you have a couple of homework, homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. And that exam, whether you get a 70 percent, an 80 percent, a 90 percent, or a 95 percent, the class moves on to the next topic. And even that 95 percent student, what was the five percent they didn't know? Maybe they didn't know what happens when you raise something to the zero power. And then you go build on that in the next concept. That's analogous to imagine learning to ride a bicycle, and maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time, and I give you that bicycle for two weeks. And then I come back after two weeks, and I say, "Well, let's see. You're having trouble taking left turns. You can't quite stop. You're an 80 percent bicyclist." So I put a big C stamp on your forehead and then I say, "Here's a unicycle." But as ridiculous as that sounds, that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now. And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of a sudden and start failing calculus all of a sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers. And it's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation. So our model is learn math the way you'd learn anything, like the way you would learn a bicycle. Stay on that bicycle. Fall off that bicycle. Do it as long as necessary until you have mastery. The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to failure. But we do expect mastery.

This is just another one of the modules. This is trigonometry. This is shifting and reflecting functions. And they all fit together. We have about 90 of these right now. And you can go to the site right now. It's all free. Not trying to sell anything. But the general idea is that they all fit into this knowledge map. That top node right there, that's literally single digit addition. It's like one plus one is equal to two. And the paradigm is, once you get 10 in a row on that, it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules. So if you keep further down the knowledge map, we're getting into more advanced arithmetic. Further down, you start getting into pre-algebra and early algebra. Further down, you start getting into algebra one, algebra two, a little bit of precalculus. And the idea is, from this we can actually teach everything -- well, everything that can be taught in this type of a framework. So you can imagine -- and this is what we are working on -- is from this knowledge map you have logic, you have computer programming, you have grammar, you have genetics, all based off of that core of, if you know this and that, now you're ready for this next concept. Now that can work well for an individual learner, and I encourage, one, for you to do it with your kids, but I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself. It'll change what happens at the dinner table.

But what we want to do is to use the natural conclusion of the flipping of the classroom that those early teachers had emailed me about. And so what I'm showing you here, this is actually data from a pilot in the Los Altos school district, where they took two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes and completely gutted their old math curriculum. These kids aren't using textbooks, they're not getting one size fits all lectures. They're doing Khan Academy, they're doing that software, for roughly half of their math class. And I want to make it clear, we don't view this as the complete math education. What it does is -- and this is what's happening in Los Altos -- it frees up time. This is the blocking and tackling, making sure you know how to move through a system of equations, and it frees up time for the simulations, for the games, for the mechanics, for the robot building, for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow.

And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day, every kid works at their own pace -- and this is actually a live dashboard from Los Altos school district -- and they look at this dashboard. Every row is a student. Every column is one of those concepts. Green means the student's already proficient. Blue means they're working on it -- no need to worry. Red means they're stuck. And what the teacher does is literally just say, "Let me intervene on the red kids." Or even better, "Let me get one of the green kids who are already proficient in that concept to be the first line of attack and actually tutor their peer."

Now I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "Oh, what do you not understand?" or "What do you do understand?" and all of the rest. So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers with as much data as possible -- really data that, in almost any other field, is expected, if you're in finance or marketing or manufacturing. And so the teachers can actually diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible. So now the teachers know exactly what the students have been up to, how long they have been spending every day, what videos have they been watching, when did they pause the videos, what did they stop watching, what exercises are they using, what have they been focused on? The outer circle shows what exercises they were focused on. The inner circle shows what videos they're focused on. And the data gets pretty granular so you can see the exact problems that the student got right or wrong. Red is wrong, blue is right. The leftmost question is the first question that the student attempted. They watched the video right over there. And then you can see, eventually, they were able to get 10 in a row. It's almost like you can see them learning over those last 10 problems. They also got faster. The height is how long it took them.

So when you talk about self-paced learning, it makes sense for everyone -- in education-speak, differentiated learning -- but it's kind of crazy when you see it in a classroom. Because every time we've done this, in every classroom we've done, over and over again, if you go five days into it, there's a group of kids who've raced ahead and there's a group of kids who are a little bit slower. And in a traditional model, if you did a snapshot assessment, you say, "These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids. Maybe they should be tracked differently. Maybe we should put them in different classes." But when you let every student work at their own pace -- and we see it over and over and over again -- you see students who took a little bit extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead. And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted. And we're seeing it over and over and over again. And it makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefitted from were really just due to a coincidence of time.

Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale, what's happening in education. And actually, that kind of brings an interesting point. A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom is focused on student-to-teacher ratios. In our mind, the relevant metric is student-to-valuable-human-time- with-the-teacher ratio. So in a traditional model, most of the teacher's time is spent giving lectures and grading and whatnot. Maybe five percent of their time is actually sitting next to students and actually working with them. Now 100 percent of their time is. So once again, using technology, not just flipping the classroom, you're humanizing the classroom, I'd argue, by a factor of five or 10.(citation)

By now I hope that some of you might have spotted the pattern of how a resource-based development process is emerging from this real-time data-centric, yet humane and sociable learning experience. And how smoothly they all integrate into the human intrinsic motivators of autonomy through self-paced lectures, mastery through peer-support, and propose through community/team building technologies.

Finally, this abundance of genuine human capital and intellectual surplus can transform our world through open-source economy. When economic growth had always based on the carrying capacity of the Earth's finite and renewable resources to generate energysurpluses. Not fiat money as debt with interest. And while we've already went beyond peak oil, our civilization has yet to progress itself beyond its oil dependency. Moreover, our prosperity is based on the sustainability and energy efficiency of our complex culture. And not the preservation of a monetary system that creates money out of thin air.

So, you answer to curb the natural self-interest of some is the indoctrination of all? The process seems to be, first, that they must listen closely to their teacher- reasonable- then, they must submit themselves to his ideas, and then they must apply what they submitted themselves to. Take the world peace affair you have mentioned- lenghtily- the student must first listen with awe at their teacher, submit themselves to his wise commands, let him choose a leader among thier pseudo-micronation, submit themselves to the establishment he has establish, then lead and live within the establishment that he created. I cannot say that I am totally convinced of this system to instill the values of virtue, charity, altruism, and honesty in our children, mainly because, when press to accept a value, I have no doubt that some will rebel, and stray far into the other direction.

This dungeon, for it is thus, would not instill the necessary values that is needed to all children for this to work. Being so, and shedding the individual for the community, let us ignore the obvious difficulty of overhaulling an overhaul of our educational system and turning to something more akin to forcing Children to pledge themselves to the Motherland and the Government- or the T'sar, or the Emperor, or that stand in of the government, the Flag- than something that promotes anything genuinely intelligent. You suppose that we should base our economy on Energy- where does "Want" play in? Even the best of us have wants- and many of us have wants beyond the simple feeling of community or spirituality- I have energy and food (pretend we already figured out how to effectively distribute them in the best possible way and in the most efficient possible manner), how would my desire for something else get satisfied? Do we barter- the problem has already been discussed in more detail previously- or, more likely, do we turn to money? Do we have a commodity monetary unit- what should it be? Food and Energy? Certainly, if we are in a community with sufficient Food and Energy, even if we have finally figured out a way to trade energy, we would have no want of it, because there is sufficient amount of it, and it is completely valueless because it is so abundant. Maybe I am interpreting it all wrong, and thus, I am not convinced of its merit. Maybe there is something that I have missed, and, should I see it more clearly, I would be absolutely convinced. Maybe I need it put in more lucid language. No matter, I am still unconvinced.

The part in red might jog your interest. Until then, you can try to argue how the natural self-interest for human beings as themselves social animals, within the context of social science and neuroscience, isn'tbelongingness.

So, you would have the world become one in thought and mind, and submit themselves unto Lord Jacques Fresco- as far as his resource based economy is concerned, I see nothing in it. I have already listed my objections to the idea that all resources should be redistributed according to the whims of a mysterious entity- you haven't made it clear who- who redistribute it for the best of all. Then you haven't answered how wants are satisfied- how should I trade when the chances of mutual interest is exceedingly low. As for psychology, I am totally ignorant of it, but that I am quite sure that there is more to desire than the wish to belong- the wish to obtain, for example.

The two proposed solution, as far as I understand it, to America's unemployment, and correct me if I am wrong, seems to be:

a) Stimulate the Economy by printing and throwing as much money as possible at the economy, and hope that, by increasing the amount of money avaliable, people will purchase, creating demand, and thus creating jobs to supply those demands. Because America is so patriotic that people only buy American, even when faced with cheaper Indian, Vietnamese, or Chinese products. This is the policy, I think, our judicious leaders have taken.

b) Let the market regulate itself, because workers will, when faced with unemployment, accept lower wages, and companies will hire them all, even if there is no demand for their product, and we are restored to that happy and blissful seat- in short, it is the best of all possible worlds, and everything lines to create the best of all possible endings.

What do you think is the right policy our nation should take in such a crisis as this?

A. would lead to inflation, last thing we need is for the price of meat to go from 5.99$ To 9.99$. this will force more people out of work....not fix anything. B. woulld be a better choice of the twobut there is better choices. 1 being the removal of most goverment programs the cost the tax payers... next would be to invest in companies that can make money through trade with other countries. As A scientist i will point out inclosed systems fail. the same goes for communities and governments.

Have you not heard of the magical Phillip's curve?

During the late fifties, British economist A.W. Phillips empirically stumbled upon an inverse relationship between unemployment and wages after plotting the figure on a graph. Economist soon realise that this relationship could be found everywhere, and soon, they connected that with inflation and a nifty explaination- as employment rise, the strenght of the labourers is greater, thus, they can raise wages. But the employers realising that this would make them less profit, would raise prices, and the workers, again, realising that this would in fact make their new gain in higher wages not really exist (if prices go up, and wage goes up in the same proportion, there is no gain) if this happens, so they go back to the table, &c. and soon, this will lead to inflation. Likewise, when there is unemployment, deflation occurs because, there being less workers, the workers are willing to work for lower wages, prices will drop, and deflation occurs. Thus, it falls to reason that there is a trade-off between inflation and employment- at least in the short term. The solution is then is to create short term inflation to stimulate the economy, create employment, &c. &c. By creating more money, the people would have more spending power, which will lead to greater purchase, and more demand. So, in effect, the government, in respect to their recent Stimulus and their printing of money, have giant lump of bronze, and they hope that it will seperate itself into copper and tin. Of course, I am no economist, and my explanation may be completely incorrect.

There's at least two problems with that "creating more money" process, when a fiat currency like the US Dollars is made of debt: one is the real physical limitation of our planet's carrying capacity simply cannot sustain an infinite growth.

These monetary learnings allow us to formulate two more extremely important Key Concepts.

The first is that all dollars are backed by debt. At the local bank level, all new money is loaned into existence. At the Federal Reserve level, money is simply manufactured out of thin air and then exchanged for interest-paying government debt. In both cases, the money is backed by debt. Debt that pays interest. From this Key Concept, we can formulate a truly profound statement, which is that at a minimum, each year enough new money must be loaned into existence to cover the interest payments on all of the past outstanding debt.

If we flip this slightly, we can say that each year all the outstanding debt must compound by at least the rate of the interest on that debt. Each and every year it must grow by some percentage. Because our debt-based money system is growing by some percentage continually, it is an exponential system by its very design. A corollary of this is that the amount of debt in the system will always exceed the amount of money.

I am not going to cast judgment on this and say that it is good or it is bad. It simply is what it is. By understanding its design, though, you will be better equipped to understand that the potential range of future outcomes for our economy are not limitless, but rather bounded by the rules of the system.

All of which leads us to the fourth Key Concept, which is that perpetual expansion is a requirement of modern banking. In fact we can make a rule: Each year, new credit (loans) must be made that at least equal the amount of all the outstanding interest payments that year. Without a continuous expansion of the money supply, past debts would not be able to be serviced, and defaults would ripple through, and possibly destroy, the entire system. Defaults are the Achilles heel of a debt-based money system, which we saw in our local banking example in the previous chapter. Because of this, all the institutional and political forces in our society are geared towards avoiding this outcome.

So the banking system must continually expand – not necessarily because it is the right (or wrong) thing to do, but, rather, simply because that is how it was designed. It is a feature of the system, just like using gasoline is a feature of my car’s engine. I might wish and hope that my car would run on straw, but I’d be wasting my time, because that’s just not how it was designed.

By understanding the requirement for continual expansion, we will be in a better position to make informed decisions about what’s likely to transpire and take meaningful actions to enhance our prospects.

More philosophically, we might wonder about the long-term viability of a system that must expand exponentially but which exists on a spherical planet. The key question is, “Can our current money system somehow be modified to be stable, fair, and useful when it is not growing?”

So the question is this: What happens when a human-contrived money system that must expand, by its very design, runs headlong into the physical limits of a spherical planet?(citation)

And two is the historical destruction of the currency itself due to hyperinflation.

It is crucially important that a nation’s money supply is carefully managed, for if it is not, the monetary unit can be destroyed by inflation. In fact, there are over 3,800 past examples of paper currencies that no longer exist. There are numerous examples from the United States, which may have some collector value but no longer possess any monetary value. Of course, I could just as easily display beautiful but no longer functional examples from Argentina, Bolivia, and Columbia, and a hundred other places

How does a hyperinflationary destruction of a currency happen?

Here’s a relatively recent example that comes from Yugoslavia between the years 1988 and 1995. Pre-1990, the Yugoslavian dinar had measurable value: You could actually buy something with one. However, throughout the 1980’s, the Yugoslavian government ran a persistent budget deficit and printed money to make up the shortfall. By the early 1990’s, the government had used up all its own hard currency reserves, and they proceeded to loot the private accounts of citizens. In order to keep things moving along, successively larger bills had to be printed, finally culminating in this stunning example – a 500 billion dinar note. At its height, inflation in Yugoslavia was running at over 37% per day. This means prices were doubling every 48 hours or so.

Let me see if I can make that more concrete for you. Suppose that on January 1, 2007, you had a penny and could find something to purchase with it. At 37% per day inflation, by April 3, 2007 you’d need one of these – a billion dollar bill – to purchase the very same item. In reverse, if you’d had a billion dollars on January 1st stuffed in a suitcase, by April 3rd you’d have had a penny’s worth of purchasing power left.

Clearly, if you’d attempted to save money during this period of time, you’d have lost it all, so we can safely state that inflationary money regimes impose a penalty on savers. The opposite side of this is that inflationary money regimes promote spending and require that money be invested or speculated, so as to at least have the chance of keeping pace with inflation. Of course, investing and speculating involve risks, so we can broaden this statement to include the claim that inflationary monetary systems require the citizens living within them to subject their hard-earned savings to risk.

That is worth pondering for a minute or two.

Even more importantly, since history shows how common it is for currencies to be mismanaged, we need to keep a careful eye on the stewards of our money to make sure they are not being irresponsible by creating too much money out of thin air and thereby destroying our savings, culture, and institutions by the process of inflation.(citation)

That's why a fiat currency is doomed to fail by its very design. And now with electronic payment system, hyperinflation can run its course without relying on printing large bills.

Jacob Goldstein: Because now, if you think of most of the money that you have, or most of the money that I have, it's never currency. I get paid. That is just a direct deposit from NPR, from my employer, to my checking account. It's not like they give me a bunch of hundred dollar bills every week. And then, I pay my bills online. So currency even now is like old-fashioned. You don't have to touch money. You don't have to see it. It's just information.Money is just an abstract and arbitrary made-belief, there's no intrinsic value in a fiat currency we use in the modern world.

Ira Glass: Until this conversation it never occurred to me that money doesn't change hands when we pay our bills online or anything. Like I don't know why I never even stopped to think, right, at no point does the bank go and deliver like $100 to the phone company on my behalf. It really is just numbers going back and forth in the computer.

Jacob Goldstein: Yeah. Nothing happens in the physical world. I mean I guess, except electrical pulses I guess it would be flying back and forth between computers. The money doesn't really exist. Not only is there no gold. There aren't even bills for most of the money that exists. Most of the money that exists is just the idea. It's just the bank saying, yes, there is this much money in your account.(citation)

So in conclusion, Money is just an abstract and arbitrary made-belief, there's no intrinsic value in a fiat currency we use in the modern world. But we're all made to believe that it's somehow important.

The two proposed solution, as far as I understand it, to America's unemployment, and correct me if I am wrong, seems to be:

a) Stimulate the Economy by printing and throwing as much money as possible at the economy, and hope that, by increasing the amount of money avaliable, people will purchase, creating demand, and thus creating jobs to supply those demands. Because America is so patriotic that people only buy American, even when faced with cheaper Indian, Vietnamese, or Chinese products. This is the policy, I think, our judicious leaders have taken.

b) Let the market regulate itself, because workers will, when faced with unemployment, accept lower wages, and companies will hire them all, even if there is no demand for their product, and we are restored to that happy and blissful seat- in short, it is the best of all possible worlds, and everything lines to create the best of all possible endings.

What do you think is the right policy our nation should take in such a crisis as this?

If only people would just see through the entertainment buzz, without themselves being indoctrinated into believing that it's somehow a dirty word. Then hopefully they would realize for themselves that socialism is about establishing an egalitarian society.

So, you would rather us go back to the Gold Standard or to a Commidity Currency system instead of our current Fiat system? I am not quite sure that getting rid of the Fiat Currency, which is simply money which the Government insures is legal tender, would be all that beneficial, being that Gold back currency would deflate the dollar to the point where, while it is worth much more, it is less competitive than- say- every other Fiat currency in the world, that is, every other currency in the world. Let us say we go back to backing our money with Gold, say, at the Bretton-Woods' 35 dollar for every ounce, Gold is, as of today, worth at around 1800$. That would make a single of our hypothetical dollar worth around 50 of our current dollar, and a single hypothetical cent worth around fifty cents. And, because there is only a limited supply of Gold in our Goverment treasury, Money becomes even more scarce. I do not think that massive deflation is the way to go. We may as well go back to the Pound, divide that into crowns, half-crowns, shillings, sixpence, thrupence, tuppence, penny, ha'penny, fathings, half-farthings and, if that is not enough, quarter-farthings if we do.

No. Not when all money become a useless and arbitrary bartering system in a resource/energy(not monetary) based economy. It can't measure electricity by watts, food by nutritional facts, civilization by prosperity, health and wellness by freedom from diseases, human flourishing by humanity, nor sustainability by bio diversity. It's a cultural legacy of no intrinsic usefulness or value within the context of nature.

So, you want to get rid of money in general, and replace that with the redistribution of energy and resources? That would have to be on an international level, because countries, in general, do not produce all of the resources it needs. Who will be the one to decide the most efficient distribution? The government? Let us assume the government is in charge of all this, and that we elect the government, who is to say that we should be able to trust them? Or that there is someone more qualified to resdistribute weath than ourselves? But, say it works, and that there is a egality in the distribution, then how would the system cope with this human disire known as 'want'? For example, how would it cope with the 'I want this, and he has it'? Obviously, we can have a system where we make everyone into selfless caring people, either by trying to eliminate the greed they have through Fun-Camps and Friendly-Land, and then everyone will all be happy nice people who give what they have to someone else who wants it, and that person would carefully accept and will be able to do the same if given the chance, which bascially amounts to brainwashing, or we could barter our tangible resources, for example, fifty bushel of wheat and a door-nail, in exchange for other tangible resources, say Milton's Paradise Lost and Hustler's magazine issue 205. That depends on the existence of Reciprocated and Mutual desire, with both parties desiring what the other has, for example, I may want Milton and Hustler, but the other fellow may not want wheat or door nails. That is why we have money, because it eliminates the need of mutual and reciprocated desire for transaction, money, either commidity based or fiat based, has the property of being able to procure objects, and has the property of procuring object- that is, it is valid now, and can be valid in the future- though, that also depends on the confidence in the money's ability. Most Socialist, including the most famous, Charles Henry Marx (an anglicisation of his name, you may well note), have been wise enough to induce the utility of money within any economic system dependant the human emotion known as 'desire', that is, almost all economic system. Even at the most primitive level, desire is the core of all economic transaction. Then, if this problem does not exist, then there is the problem of how to get there. Do we go there immediately, and rush to where angels dare not tread, or do we arrive there in graduations.

Brainwashing? Well talk about your irony. When the fact is your false-positive superstition on mere "desire" as human nature, is but a naturalistic fallacy within the context of social psychology and neuroscience. When the fact is humans as social animals both desire and need the experience of belongingness, not mere material possession.

Belonging-ness as a Basic Need

Just as protein is needed in the diet for the health of the body, so belongingness is a basic need for the mind and soul. In the early years of the study of depth psychology, different innovators explored our “basic” motivations. Freud suggested sex and aggression as two key drives, Alfred Adler noted the seeking of the sense of superiority to counter inferiority feelings, and Jung noted a wide range of archetypal sources of motivation. Others also came up with their suggestions.

By the 1940s, though, child development research had considered another interesting disease that was prevalent again in orphanages, variously called "hospitalism," "anaclitic depression", or “marasmus," and describing the way some babies became sickly and often died! They traced this not to not being fed, but not being sufficiently cuddled, touched, played with! Other researchers supported the growing need for contact—and this in some ways was in contrast to a fashion in the child-rearing texts of the 1920s and 1930s to not pick up the crying child lest he be “spoiled.” (The success of the Doctor Spock books in the late 1940s was due to his challenging this anti-spoiling regiment. Benjamin Spock didn’t support “permissiveness” as his enemies accused, but simply not being harshly reserved.)

Psychoanalysts in the 1950s wove such research into revisions of theory, and while some stayed with Freud’s earlier “drive” theories, a fair number came to espouse what came to be called object relations theory. (This term refers to the object of a person’s love—and/or hate—, but many think of objects as inanimate, so the term is somewhat somewhat misleading; the theory itself seeks to highlight the intensity and depth of interpersonal relations.)

Much of object relations theory originally was based on observations about the interactions of infants and young children and their parents or caretakers, but what should be realized as that these early bonding experiences, with all their ups and downs, is only a small part of the richness of the dynamic! By age four to six, young children expand the scope of their worlds to include wider circles of friends, neighbors, and more abstract entities. Kids hear about and begin to root for the teams their parents root for, begin to relate to the family’s or communities myths about gods or spiritual entities, partake of ethnic identities, and feel patriotism and other sorts of loyalty. The term, belongingness, then, is more understandable and inclusive of our broader, more complex and life-long needs for feeling connected.(citation)

However, that human need for the experience of belongingness through social connection got highjacked by the psychotic corporate cultural practice of perception management from cradle to grave. AKA your "Fun-Camps" and "Friendly-Land" created by the corporations. When they basically socialized our children that in order for them to be worthy of belongingness, they need to possess their products, while compete in an arbitrary social hierarchy of vanity and shallowness.

Actually, I never said it is in man's nature to 'desire', but that desire, as in material desire, is the driving force of all economic transaction. Maybe there are people simply content with the satisfaction of 'Belonging'- whether to a community, a religion, a family, what ever, but, it is also true that some people have material want. It is not an illusion created by the corporations, material wants is what drove trade since the beginning of time, before the creation of corporations, before Capitalism, etc. But all this still avoids the question that I posit, how does your proposed system work? How does it overcome those limitations? How do we get to it? If it doesn't answer those question, it cannot work as an economic model.

The psychological dark triad of a personality continuum for narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy does predate the creation of corporations, governments, and capitalism as systems of modern society. When these ideas as dangerous memes are only the manifestos of said evil personalities, which later on became their own cultural legacies and social processes for evil.

The common thread running through all three traits of The Dark Triad (Machiavellianism, subclinical narcissism, and subclinical psychopathy) is high selfishness and low disagreeableness. Still, the three traits are only moderately correlated with one another, and recently researchers have started to assess the independent predictions of each separately from the others, and how people with a different balance of the Dark Triad go about obtaining their goals differently. For instance, recent research conducted by Peter Jonason, Glenn Geher, and myself suggests that narcissism is tied most heavily to extroversion and a desire to engage in social interactions whereas psychopathy is negatively related to extroversion.

Also of particular note is how each member of The Dark Triad is differentially related to different forms of impulsivity. Scott J. Dickman differentiates between two different forms of impulsivity: functional impulsivity and dysfunctional impulsivity. Functional impulsivity is related to idea generation, enthusiasm, adventurousness, and the ability to make quick decisions. On the other hand, dysfunctional impulsivity is related to erratic disorderliness, distraction, and inaccurate decision making.

To see how each of the members of The Dark Triad is related to impulsivity, Daniel N. Jones and Delroy L. Paulhus recently administered a battery of Dark Triad and impulsivity tests to 142 undergraduates as well as 329 adults in the community. Their measure of Psychopathy included four components: erratic lifestyle (e.g., "I am a rebellious person"), interpersonal manipulation (e.g., "I would get a kick out of 'scamming' someone"), callous affect ("e.g., "Most people are wimps"), and antisocial behavior (e.g., "I have tricked someone into giving me money"). They found that all four components of Psychopathy were extremely highly related to one another. Their measure of Machiavellianism included items such as "Anyone who completely trusts anyone else is asking for trouble" and their measure of narcissism included items such as "I like to be the center of attention". Finally, their measure of functional impulsivity included items such as "Most of the time, I can put my thoughts into words very rapidly", whereas their measure of dysfunctional impulsivity included items such as "I often get into trouble because I do not think before I act."

Even though the inter-correlations among the members of the Dark Triad were higher in the community sample, they found a similar pattern of results for both the student and community sample. Both narcissistic and psychopathic individuals tended to show higher levels of overall impulsivity. More telling though were correlations with the different types of impulsivity. Psychopathy was primarily associated with dysfunctional impulsivity, whereas narcissism was primarily related to functional impulsivity. Interestingly, Machavellianism was unrelated to either type of impulsivity.

According to the researchers, these results help explain why narcissism is a mixed blessing. In situations where accuracy is less important than speedy responses (e.g., short-term social interactions), functional impulsivity will be adaptive for narcissists. Over time, though, even functional impulsivity will start to show detrimental effects on interpersonal relationships.

The link between psychopathy and dysfunctional impulsivity is consistent with other research showing that psychopaths lack the ability to inhibit their antisocial impulses. The lack of relation between impulsivity and Machiavellianism is interesting and the researchers suggest that Machiavellian individuals may have an advantage over psychopaths and narcissists because their moderate impulse control may allow them to "refrain from counterproductive behaviors despite their selfish intentions".

The researchers conclude,

"Taken together, our two studies add to the accumulating evidence that the Dark Triad members have unique personality styles favoring different life outcomes. Each member has a unique social engagement style that might prove adaptive in some situations but maladaptive in others."

By studying beautiful minds as well as not-so beautiful minds, I think we can come to a more nuanced and richer understanding of human nature and the various paths by which people obtain their goals.(citation)

And it's exactly through the moral neutral that is our cultural legacy, where we can master the social process of empathy and altruism, starting with an education reform. Which Sir Ken Robinson had explained rather well in his TED Talk called Changing education paradigms. That "the problem is they are trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past." While "on the way they are alienating millions of kids who don't see any purpose in going to school."

I believe we need our children to surpass ourselves as future leaders in a global community, which means we need to cultivate them within a cultural legacy of leadership based on "listen, learn, then lead".

And you have to watch and take care of each other. I probably learned the most about relationships. I learned they are the sinew which hold the force together. I grew up much of my career in the Ranger regiment. And every morning in the Ranger regiment, every Ranger -- and there are more than 2,000 of them -- says a six-stanza Ranger creed. You may know one line of it, it says, "I'll never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy." And it's not a mindless mantra, and it's not a poem. It's a promise. Every Ranger promises every other Ranger now matter what happens, no matter what it costs me, if you need me, I'm coming. And every Ranger gets that same promise from every other Ranger. Think about it. It's extraordinarily powerful. It's probably more powerful than marriage vows. And they've lived up to it, which gives it special power. And so the organizational relationship that bonds them is just amazing.

And I learned personal relationships were more important than ever. We were in a difficult operation in Afghanistan in 2007, and an old friend of mine, that I had spent many years at various points of my career with -- godfather to one of their kids -- he sent me a note, just in an envelope, that had a quote from Sherman to Grant that said, "I knew if I ever got in a tight spot, that you would come, if alive." And having that kind of relationship, for me, turned out to be critical at many points in my career.

And I learned that you have to give that in this environment, because it's tough. That was my journey. I hope it's not over. I came to believe that a leader isn't good because they're right; they're good because they're willing to learn and to trust. This isn't easy stuff. It's not like that electronic abs machine where, 15 minutes a month, you get washboard abs. And it isn't always fair. You can get knocked down, and it hurts and it leaves scars. But if you're a leader, the people you've counted on will help you up. And if you're a leader, the people who count on you need you on your feet.(citation)

That's not cultural legacy grounded in academics, but rather it's about ethics and empathy. Which is rightfully so considering the next revolutionary shift in learning global politics through complex, engaging, and dynamic "World Peace" game.

And so this World Peace Game I'd like to tell you about. It started out like this: it's just a four-foot by five-foot plywood board in an inner-city urban school, 1978. I was creating a lesson for students on Africa. We put all the problems of the world there, and I thought, let's let them solve it. I didn't want to lecture or have just book reading. I wanted to have them be immersed and learn the feeling of learning through their bodies. So I thought, well they like to play games. I'll make something -- I didn't say interactive. We didn't have that term in 1978 -- but something interactive. And so we made the game, and it has since evolved to a four-foot by four-foot by four-foot Plexiglass structure. And it has four Plexiglass layers.

There's an outer space layer with black holes and satellites and research satellites and asteroid mining. There's an air and space level with clouds that are big puffs of cotton we push around and territorial air spaces and air forces, a ground and sea level with thousands of game pieces on it -- even an undersea level with submarines and undersea mining. There are four countries around the board. The kids make up the names of the countries -- some are rich some are poor. They have different assets, commercial and military. And each country has a cabinet. There's a prime minister, secretary of state, minister of defense and a CFO, or comptroller. I choose the prime minister based on my relationship with them. I offer them the job, they can turn it down, and then they choose their own cabinet. There's a World Bank, arms dealers and a United Nations. There's also a weather goddess who controls a random stock market and random weather.

That's not all. And then there's a 13-page crisis document with 50 interlocking problems. So that, if one thing changes, everything else changes. I throw them into this complex matrix, and they trust me because we have a deep, rich relationship together. And so with all these crises, we have -- let's see -- ethnic and minority tensions; we have chemical and nuclear spills, nuclear proliferation. There's oil spills, environmental disasters, water rights disputes, breakaway republics, famine, endangered species and global warming. If Al Gore is here, I'm going to send my fourth-graders from Agnor-Hurt and Venable school to you because they solved global warming in a week. And they've done it several times too.

So I also have in the game a saboteur -- some child -- it's basically a troublemaker -- and I have my troublemaker put to use because they, on the surface, are trying to save the world and their position in the game. But they're also trying to undermine everything in the game. And they do it secretly through misinformation and ambiguities and irrelevancies, trying to cause everyone to think more deeply. The saboteur is there, and we also read from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War." Fourth-graders understand it -- nine years old -- and they handle that and use that to understand how to, not follow -- at first they do -- the paths to power and destruction, the path to war. They learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking, to think in a long-term, more consequential way.(citation)

So that's one example of how to cultivate ethics and empathy within children through self-guided social gaming. But what about academic learning that's insofar had always been done in a dehumanizing, individualistic, and atomized environment? Well one Salman Khan has an interesting and innovative alternative in his TED Talk called Let's use video to reinvent education.

The other thing that happened -- and even at this point, I said, "Okay, maybe it's a good supplement. It's good for motivated students. It's good for maybe home schoolers." But I didn't think it would be something that would somehow penetrate the classroom. But then I started getting letters from teachers. And the teachers would write, saying, "We use your videos to flip the classroom. You've given the lectures, so now what we do ... " and this could happen in every classroom in America tomorrow, " ... what I do is I assign the lectures for homework. And what used to be homework, I now have the students doing in the classroom."

And I want to pause here for a second, because there's a couple of interesting things. One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit -- the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did. They can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. But the more interesting thing is -- and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom -- by removing the one size fits all lecture from the classroom and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, and then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom. They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience -- 30 kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other. A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one size fits all lecture to 30 students -- blank faces, slightly antagonistic -- and now it's a human experience. Now they're actually interacting with each other.

So once the Khan Academy -- I quit my job and we turned into a real organization -- we're a not-for-profit -- the question is, how do we take this to the next level? How do we take what those teachers are doing to their natural conclusion? And so what I'm showing you over here, these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins. The ones I started were much more primitive. This is a more competent version of it. But the paradigm here is, we'll generate as many questions as you need until you get that concept, until you get 10 in a row. And the Khan Academy videos are there. You get hints, the actual steps for that problem, if you don't know how to do it. But the paradigm here, it seems like a very simple thing: 10 in a row, you move on. But it's fundamentally different than what's happening in classrooms right now.

In a traditional classroom, you have a couple of homework, homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. And that exam, whether you get a 70 percent, an 80 percent, a 90 percent, or a 95 percent, the class moves on to the next topic. And even that 95 percent student, what was the five percent they didn't know? Maybe they didn't know what happens when you raise something to the zero power. And then you go build on that in the next concept. That's analogous to imagine learning to ride a bicycle, and maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time, and I give you that bicycle for two weeks. And then I come back after two weeks, and I say, "Well, let's see. You're having trouble taking left turns. You can't quite stop. You're an 80 percent bicyclist." So I put a big C stamp on your forehead and then I say, "Here's a unicycle." But as ridiculous as that sounds, that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now. And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of a sudden and start failing calculus all of a sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers. And it's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation. So our model is learn math the way you'd learn anything, like the way you would learn a bicycle. Stay on that bicycle. Fall off that bicycle. Do it as long as necessary until you have mastery. The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to failure. But we do expect mastery.

This is just another one of the modules. This is trigonometry. This is shifting and reflecting functions. And they all fit together. We have about 90 of these right now. And you can go to the site right now. It's all free. Not trying to sell anything. But the general idea is that they all fit into this knowledge map. That top node right there, that's literally single digit addition. It's like one plus one is equal to two. And the paradigm is, once you get 10 in a row on that, it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules. So if you keep further down the knowledge map, we're getting into more advanced arithmetic. Further down, you start getting into pre-algebra and early algebra. Further down, you start getting into algebra one, algebra two, a little bit of precalculus. And the idea is, from this we can actually teach everything -- well, everything that can be taught in this type of a framework. So you can imagine -- and this is what we are working on -- is from this knowledge map you have logic, you have computer programming, you have grammar, you have genetics, all based off of that core of, if you know this and that, now you're ready for this next concept. Now that can work well for an individual learner, and I encourage, one, for you to do it with your kids, but I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself. It'll change what happens at the dinner table.

But what we want to do is to use the natural conclusion of the flipping of the classroom that those early teachers had emailed me about. And so what I'm showing you here, this is actually data from a pilot in the Los Altos school district, where they took two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes and completely gutted their old math curriculum. These kids aren't using textbooks, they're not getting one size fits all lectures. They're doing Khan Academy, they're doing that software, for roughly half of their math class. And I want to make it clear, we don't view this as the complete math education. What it does is -- and this is what's happening in Los Altos -- it frees up time. This is the blocking and tackling, making sure you know how to move through a system of equations, and it frees up time for the simulations, for the games, for the mechanics, for the robot building, for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow.

And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day, every kid works at their own pace -- and this is actually a live dashboard from Los Altos school district -- and they look at this dashboard. Every row is a student. Every column is one of those concepts. Green means the student's already proficient. Blue means they're working on it -- no need to worry. Red means they're stuck. And what the teacher does is literally just say, "Let me intervene on the red kids." Or even better, "Let me get one of the green kids who are already proficient in that concept to be the first line of attack and actually tutor their peer."

Now I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "Oh, what do you not understand?" or "What do you do understand?" and all of the rest. So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers with as much data as possible -- really data that, in almost any other field, is expected, if you're in finance or marketing or manufacturing. And so the teachers can actually diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible. So now the teachers know exactly what the students have been up to, how long they have been spending every day, what videos have they been watching, when did they pause the videos, what did they stop watching, what exercises are they using, what have they been focused on? The outer circle shows what exercises they were focused on. The inner circle shows what videos they're focused on. And the data gets pretty granular so you can see the exact problems that the student got right or wrong. Red is wrong, blue is right. The leftmost question is the first question that the student attempted. They watched the video right over there. And then you can see, eventually, they were able to get 10 in a row. It's almost like you can see them learning over those last 10 problems. They also got faster. The height is how long it took them.

So when you talk about self-paced learning, it makes sense for everyone -- in education-speak, differentiated learning -- but it's kind of crazy when you see it in a classroom. Because every time we've done this, in every classroom we've done, over and over again, if you go five days into it, there's a group of kids who've raced ahead and there's a group of kids who are a little bit slower. And in a traditional model, if you did a snapshot assessment, you say, "These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids. Maybe they should be tracked differently. Maybe we should put them in different classes." But when you let every student work at their own pace -- and we see it over and over and over again -- you see students who took a little bit extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead. And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted. And we're seeing it over and over and over again. And it makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefitted from were really just due to a coincidence of time.

Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale, what's happening in education. And actually, that kind of brings an interesting point. A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom is focused on student-to-teacher ratios. In our mind, the relevant metric is student-to-valuable-human-time- with-the-teacher ratio. So in a traditional model, most of the teacher's time is spent giving lectures and grading and whatnot. Maybe five percent of their time is actually sitting next to students and actually working with them. Now 100 percent of their time is. So once again, using technology, not just flipping the classroom, you're humanizing the classroom, I'd argue, by a factor of five or 10.(citation)

By now I hope that some of you might have spotted the pattern of how a resource-based development process is emerging from this real-time data-centric, yet humane and sociable learning experience. And how smoothly they all integrate into the human intrinsic motivators of autonomy through self-paced lectures, mastery through peer-support, and propose through community/team building technologies.

Finally, this abundance of genuine human capital and intellectual surplus can transform our world through open-source economy. When economic growth had always based on the carrying capacity of the Earth's finite and renewable resources to generate energysurpluses. Not fiat money as debt with interest. And while we've already went beyond peak oil, our civilization has yet to progress itself beyond its oil dependency. Moreover, our prosperity is based on the sustainability and energy efficiency of our complex culture. And not the preservation of a monetary system that creates money out of thin air.

So, you answer to curb the natural self-interest of some is the indoctrination of all? The process seems to be, first, that they must listen closely to their teacher- reasonable- then, they must submit themselves to his ideas, and then they must apply what they submitted themselves to. Take the world peace affair you have mentioned- lenghtily- the student must first listen with awe at their teacher, submit themselves to his wise commands, let him choose a leader among thier pseudo-micronation, submit themselves to the establishment he has establish, then lead and live within the establishment that he created. I cannot say that I am totally convinced of this system to instill the values of virtue, charity, altruism, and honesty in our children, mainly because, when press to accept a value, I have no doubt that some will rebel, and stray far into the other direction.

This dungeon, for it is thus, would not instill the necessary values that is needed to all children for this to work. Being so, and shedding the individual for the community, let us ignore the obvious difficulty of overhaulling an overhaul of our educational system and turning to something more akin to forcing Children to pledge themselves to the Motherland and the Government- or the T'sar, or the Emperor, or that stand in of the government, the Flag- than something that promotes anything genuinely intelligent. You suppose that we should base our economy on Energy- where does "Want" play in? Even the best of us have wants- and many of us have wants beyond the simple feeling of community or spirituality- I have energy and food (pretend we already figured out how to effectively distribute them in the best possible way and in the most efficient possible manner), how would my desire for something else get satisfied? Do we barter- the problem has already been discussed in more detail previously- or, more likely, do we turn to money? Do we have a commodity monetary unit- what should it be? Food and Energy? Certainly, if we are in a community with sufficient Food and Energy, even if we have finally figured out a way to trade energy, we would have no want of it, because there is sufficient amount of it, and it is completely valueless because it is so abundant. Maybe I am interpreting it all wrong, and thus, I am not convinced of its merit. Maybe there is something that I have missed, and, should I see it more clearly, I would be absolutely convinced. Maybe I need it put in more lucid language. No matter, I am still unconvinced.

The part in red might jog your interest. Until then, you can try to argue how the natural self-interest for human beings as themselves social animals, within the context of social science and neuroscience, isn'tbelongingness.

So, you would have the world become one in thought and mind, and submit themselves unto Lord Jacques Fresco- as far as his resource based economy is concerned, I see nothing in it. I have already listed my objections to the idea that all resources should be redistributed according to the whims of a mysterious entity- you haven't made it clear who- who redistribute it for the best of all. Then you haven't answered how wants are satisfied- how should I trade when the chances of mutual interest is exceedingly low. As for psychology, I am totally ignorant of it, but that I am quite sure that there is more to desire than the wish to belong- the wish to obtain, for example.

Why bother? When you declared your ignorance on the subject of holistic socioeconomic within the context of nature itself. While you're fearful of a conspiracy that's not even there, simply because the emergence of biomimicry is transparent for all through the process of the scientific method, and through trial and error. The fact is no finance nor politics can ever convince you otherwise, simply because you're afraid of the unknown caused by your willful ignorance.

Finally, when nihilism is your only line of defense. Don't even contradict yourself with your line of questioning about wants, interests, trades, or even purposes. At least commodity traders would tell lies to themselves, when in fact they're banking on the possibility of another financial collapse. They're opportunistic when it comes to themselves benefiting and profiting from crisis caused by people's fear, and you're helping them with your fear induced ignorance.

The two proposed solution, as far as I understand it, to America's unemployment, and correct me if I am wrong, seems to be:

a) Stimulate the Economy by printing and throwing as much money as possible at the economy, and hope that, by increasing the amount of money avaliable, people will purchase, creating demand, and thus creating jobs to supply those demands. Because America is so patriotic that people only buy American, even when faced with cheaper Indian, Vietnamese, or Chinese products. This is the policy, I think, our judicious leaders have taken.

b) Let the market regulate itself, because workers will, when faced with unemployment, accept lower wages, and companies will hire them all, even if there is no demand for their product, and we are restored to that happy and blissful seat- in short, it is the best of all possible worlds, and everything lines to create the best of all possible endings.

What do you think is the right policy our nation should take in such a crisis as this?

A. would lead to inflation, last thing we need is for the price of meat to go from 5.99$ To 9.99$. this will force more people out of work....not fix anything. B. woulld be a better choice of the twobut there is better choices. 1 being the removal of most goverment programs the cost the tax payers... next would be to invest in companies that can make money through trade with other countries. As A scientist i will point out inclosed systems fail. the same goes for communities and governments.

Have you not heard of the magical Phillip's curve?

During the late fifties, British economist A.W. Phillips empirically stumbled upon an inverse relationship between unemployment and wages after plotting the figure on a graph. Economist soon realise that this relationship could be found everywhere, and soon, they connected that with inflation and a nifty explaination- as employment rise, the strenght of the labourers is greater, thus, they can raise wages. But the employers realising that this would make them less profit, would raise prices, and the workers, again, realising that this would in fact make their new gain in higher wages not really exist (if prices go up, and wage goes up in the same proportion, there is no gain) if this happens, so they go back to the table, &c. and soon, this will lead to inflation. Likewise, when there is unemployment, deflation occurs because, there being less workers, the workers are willing to work for lower wages, prices will drop, and deflation occurs. Thus, it falls to reason that there is a trade-off between inflation and employment- at least in the short term. The solution is then is to create short term inflation to stimulate the economy, create employment, &c. &c. By creating more money, the people would have more spending power, which will lead to greater purchase, and more demand. So, in effect, the government, in respect to their recent Stimulus and their printing of money, have giant lump of bronze, and they hope that it will seperate itself into copper and tin. Of course, I am no economist, and my explanation may be completely incorrect.

There's at least two problems with that "creating more money" process, when a fiat currency like the US Dollars is made of debt: one is the real physical limitation of our planet's carrying capacity simply cannot sustain an infinite growth.

These monetary learnings allow us to formulate two more extremely important Key Concepts.

The first is that all dollars are backed by debt. At the local bank level, all new money is loaned into existence. At the Federal Reserve level, money is simply manufactured out of thin air and then exchanged for interest-paying government debt. In both cases, the money is backed by debt. Debt that pays interest. From this Key Concept, we can formulate a truly profound statement, which is that at a minimum, each year enough new money must be loaned into existence to cover the interest payments on all of the past outstanding debt.

If we flip this slightly, we can say that each year all the outstanding debt must compound by at least the rate of the interest on that debt. Each and every year it must grow by some percentage. Because our debt-based money system is growing by some percentage continually, it is an exponential system by its very design. A corollary of this is that the amount of debt in the system will always exceed the amount of money.

I am not going to cast judgment on this and say that it is good or it is bad. It simply is what it is. By understanding its design, though, you will be better equipped to understand that the potential range of future outcomes for our economy are not limitless, but rather bounded by the rules of the system.

All of which leads us to the fourth Key Concept, which is that perpetual expansion is a requirement of modern banking. In fact we can make a rule: Each year, new credit (loans) must be made that at least equal the amount of all the outstanding interest payments that year. Without a continuous expansion of the money supply, past debts would not be able to be serviced, and defaults would ripple through, and possibly destroy, the entire system. Defaults are the Achilles heel of a debt-based money system, which we saw in our local banking example in the previous chapter. Because of this, all the institutional and political forces in our society are geared towards avoiding this outcome.

So the banking system must continually expand – not necessarily because it is the right (or wrong) thing to do, but, rather, simply because that is how it was designed. It is a feature of the system, just like using gasoline is a feature of my car’s engine. I might wish and hope that my car would run on straw, but I’d be wasting my time, because that’s just not how it was designed.

By understanding the requirement for continual expansion, we will be in a better position to make informed decisions about what’s likely to transpire and take meaningful actions to enhance our prospects.

More philosophically, we might wonder about the long-term viability of a system that must expand exponentially but which exists on a spherical planet. The key question is, “Can our current money system somehow be modified to be stable, fair, and useful when it is not growing?”

So the question is this: What happens when a human-contrived money system that must expand, by its very design, runs headlong into the physical limits of a spherical planet?(citation)

And two is the historical destruction of the currency itself due to hyperinflation.

It is crucially important that a nation’s money supply is carefully managed, for if it is not, the monetary unit can be destroyed by inflation. In fact, there are over 3,800 past examples of paper currencies that no longer exist. There are numerous examples from the United States, which may have some collector value but no longer possess any monetary value. Of course, I could just as easily display beautiful but no longer functional examples from Argentina, Bolivia, and Columbia, and a hundred other places

How does a hyperinflationary destruction of a currency happen?

Here’s a relatively recent example that comes from Yugoslavia between the years 1988 and 1995. Pre-1990, the Yugoslavian dinar had measurable value: You could actually buy something with one. However, throughout the 1980’s, the Yugoslavian government ran a persistent budget deficit and printed money to make up the shortfall. By the early 1990’s, the government had used up all its own hard currency reserves, and they proceeded to loot the private accounts of citizens. In order to keep things moving along, successively larger bills had to be printed, finally culminating in this stunning example – a 500 billion dinar note. At its height, inflation in Yugoslavia was running at over 37% per day. This means prices were doubling every 48 hours or so.

Let me see if I can make that more concrete for you. Suppose that on January 1, 2007, you had a penny and could find something to purchase with it. At 37% per day inflation, by April 3, 2007 you’d need one of these – a billion dollar bill – to purchase the very same item. In reverse, if you’d had a billion dollars on January 1st stuffed in a suitcase, by April 3rd you’d have had a penny’s worth of purchasing power left.

Clearly, if you’d attempted to save money during this period of time, you’d have lost it all, so we can safely state that inflationary money regimes impose a penalty on savers. The opposite side of this is that inflationary money regimes promote spending and require that money be invested or speculated, so as to at least have the chance of keeping pace with inflation. Of course, investing and speculating involve risks, so we can broaden this statement to include the claim that inflationary monetary systems require the citizens living within them to subject their hard-earned savings to risk.

That is worth pondering for a minute or two.

Even more importantly, since history shows how common it is for currencies to be mismanaged, we need to keep a careful eye on the stewards of our money to make sure they are not being irresponsible by creating too much money out of thin air and thereby destroying our savings, culture, and institutions by the process of inflation.(citation)

That's why a fiat currency is doomed to fail by its very design. And now with electronic payment system, hyperinflation can run its course without relying on printing large bills.

Jacob Goldstein: Because now, if you think of most of the money that you have, or most of the money that I have, it's never currency. I get paid. That is just a direct deposit from NPR, from my employer, to my checking account. It's not like they give me a bunch of hundred dollar bills every week. And then, I pay my bills online. So currency even now is like old-fashioned. You don't have to touch money. You don't have to see it. It's just information.Money is just an abstract and arbitrary made-belief, there's no intrinsic value in a fiat currency we use in the modern world.

Ira Glass: Until this conversation it never occurred to me that money doesn't change hands when we pay our bills online or anything. Like I don't know why I never even stopped to think, right, at no point does the bank go and deliver like $100 to the phone company on my behalf. It really is just numbers going back and forth in the computer.

Jacob Goldstein: Yeah. Nothing happens in the physical world. I mean I guess, except electrical pulses I guess it would be flying back and forth between computers. The money doesn't really exist. Not only is there no gold. There aren't even bills for most of the money that exists. Most of the money that exists is just the idea. It's just the bank saying, yes, there is this much money in your account.(citation)

So in conclusion, Money is just an abstract and arbitrary made-belief, there's no intrinsic value in a fiat currency we use in the modern world. But we're all made to believe that it's somehow important.

The two proposed solution, as far as I understand it, to America's unemployment, and correct me if I am wrong, seems to be:

a) Stimulate the Economy by printing and throwing as much money as possible at the economy, and hope that, by increasing the amount of money avaliable, people will purchase, creating demand, and thus creating jobs to supply those demands. Because America is so patriotic that people only buy American, even when faced with cheaper Indian, Vietnamese, or Chinese products. This is the policy, I think, our judicious leaders have taken.

b) Let the market regulate itself, because workers will, when faced with unemployment, accept lower wages, and companies will hire them all, even if there is no demand for their product, and we are restored to that happy and blissful seat- in short, it is the best of all possible worlds, and everything lines to create the best of all possible endings.

What do you think is the right policy our nation should take in such a crisis as this?

If only people would just see through the entertainment buzz, without themselves being indoctrinated into believing that it's somehow a dirty word. Then hopefully they would realize for themselves that socialism is about establishing an egalitarian society.

So, you would rather us go back to the Gold Standard or to a Commidity Currency system instead of our current Fiat system? I am not quite sure that getting rid of the Fiat Currency, which is simply money which the Government insures is legal tender, would be all that beneficial, being that Gold back currency would deflate the dollar to the point where, while it is worth much more, it is less competitive than- say- every other Fiat currency in the world, that is, every other currency in the world. Let us say we go back to backing our money with Gold, say, at the Bretton-Woods' 35 dollar for every ounce, Gold is, as of today, worth at around 1800$. That would make a single of our hypothetical dollar worth around 50 of our current dollar, and a single hypothetical cent worth around fifty cents. And, because there is only a limited supply of Gold in our Goverment treasury, Money becomes even more scarce. I do not think that massive deflation is the way to go. We may as well go back to the Pound, divide that into crowns, half-crowns, shillings, sixpence, thrupence, tuppence, penny, ha'penny, fathings, half-farthings and, if that is not enough, quarter-farthings if we do.

No. Not when all money become a useless and arbitrary bartering system in a resource/energy(not monetary) based economy. It can't measure electricity by watts, food by nutritional facts, civilization by prosperity, health and wellness by freedom from diseases, human flourishing by humanity, nor sustainability by bio diversity. It's a cultural legacy of no intrinsic usefulness or value within the context of nature.

So, you want to get rid of money in general, and replace that with the redistribution of energy and resources? That would have to be on an international level, because countries, in general, do not produce all of the resources it needs. Who will be the one to decide the most efficient distribution? The government? Let us assume the government is in charge of all this, and that we elect the government, who is to say that we should be able to trust them? Or that there is someone more qualified to resdistribute weath than ourselves? But, say it works, and that there is a egality in the distribution, then how would the system cope with this human disire known as 'want'? For example, how would it cope with the 'I want this, and he has it'? Obviously, we can have a system where we make everyone into selfless caring people, either by trying to eliminate the greed they have through Fun-Camps and Friendly-Land, and then everyone will all be happy nice people who give what they have to someone else who wants it, and that person would carefully accept and will be able to do the same if given the chance, which bascially amounts to brainwashing, or we could barter our tangible resources, for example, fifty bushel of wheat and a door-nail, in exchange for other tangible resources, say Milton's Paradise Lost and Hustler's magazine issue 205. That depends on the existence of Reciprocated and Mutual desire, with both parties desiring what the other has, for example, I may want Milton and Hustler, but the other fellow may not want wheat or door nails. That is why we have money, because it eliminates the need of mutual and reciprocated desire for transaction, money, either commidity based or fiat based, has the property of being able to procure objects, and has the property of procuring object- that is, it is valid now, and can be valid in the future- though, that also depends on the confidence in the money's ability. Most Socialist, including the most famous, Charles Henry Marx (an anglicisation of his name, you may well note), have been wise enough to induce the utility of money within any economic system dependant the human emotion known as 'desire', that is, almost all economic system. Even at the most primitive level, desire is the core of all economic transaction. Then, if this problem does not exist, then there is the problem of how to get there. Do we go there immediately, and rush to where angels dare not tread, or do we arrive there in graduations.

Brainwashing? Well talk about your irony. When the fact is your false-positive superstition on mere "desire" as human nature, is but a naturalistic fallacy within the context of social psychology and neuroscience. When the fact is humans as social animals both desire and need the experience of belongingness, not mere material possession.

Belonging-ness as a Basic Need

Just as protein is needed in the diet for the health of the body, so belongingness is a basic need for the mind and soul. In the early years of the study of depth psychology, different innovators explored our “basic” motivations. Freud suggested sex and aggression as two key drives, Alfred Adler noted the seeking of the sense of superiority to counter inferiority feelings, and Jung noted a wide range of archetypal sources of motivation. Others also came up with their suggestions.

By the 1940s, though, child development research had considered another interesting disease that was prevalent again in orphanages, variously called "hospitalism," "anaclitic depression", or “marasmus," and describing the way some babies became sickly and often died! They traced this not to not being fed, but not being sufficiently cuddled, touched, played with! Other researchers supported the growing need for contact—and this in some ways was in contrast to a fashion in the child-rearing texts of the 1920s and 1930s to not pick up the crying child lest he be “spoiled.” (The success of the Doctor Spock books in the late 1940s was due to his challenging this anti-spoiling regiment. Benjamin Spock didn’t support “permissiveness” as his enemies accused, but simply not being harshly reserved.)

Psychoanalysts in the 1950s wove such research into revisions of theory, and while some stayed with Freud’s earlier “drive” theories, a fair number came to espouse what came to be called object relations theory. (This term refers to the object of a person’s love—and/or hate—, but many think of objects as inanimate, so the term is somewhat somewhat misleading; the theory itself seeks to highlight the intensity and depth of interpersonal relations.)

Much of object relations theory originally was based on observations about the interactions of infants and young children and their parents or caretakers, but what should be realized as that these early bonding experiences, with all their ups and downs, is only a small part of the richness of the dynamic! By age four to six, young children expand the scope of their worlds to include wider circles of friends, neighbors, and more abstract entities. Kids hear about and begin to root for the teams their parents root for, begin to relate to the family’s or communities myths about gods or spiritual entities, partake of ethnic identities, and feel patriotism and other sorts of loyalty. The term, belongingness, then, is more understandable and inclusive of our broader, more complex and life-long needs for feeling connected.(citation)

However, that human need for the experience of belongingness through social connection got highjacked by the psychotic corporate cultural practice of perception management from cradle to grave. AKA your "Fun-Camps" and "Friendly-Land" created by the corporations. When they basically socialized our children that in order for them to be worthy of belongingness, they need to possess their products, while compete in an arbitrary social hierarchy of vanity and shallowness.

Actually, I never said it is in man's nature to 'desire', but that desire, as in material desire, is the driving force of all economic transaction. Maybe there are people simply content with the satisfaction of 'Belonging'- whether to a community, a religion, a family, what ever, but, it is also true that some people have material want. It is not an illusion created by the corporations, material wants is what drove trade since the beginning of time, before the creation of corporations, before Capitalism, etc. But all this still avoids the question that I posit, how does your proposed system work? How does it overcome those limitations? How do we get to it? If it doesn't answer those question, it cannot work as an economic model.

The psychological dark triad of a personality continuum for narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy does predate the creation of corporations, governments, and capitalism as systems of modern society. When these ideas as dangerous memes are only the manifestos of said evil personalities, which later on became their own cultural legacies and social processes for evil.

The common thread running through all three traits of The Dark Triad (Machiavellianism, subclinical narcissism, and subclinical psychopathy) is high selfishness and low disagreeableness. Still, the three traits are only moderately correlated with one another, and recently researchers have started to assess the independent predictions of each separately from the others, and how people with a different balance of the Dark Triad go about obtaining their goals differently. For instance, recent research conducted by Peter Jonason, Glenn Geher, and myself suggests that narcissism is tied most heavily to extroversion and a desire to engage in social interactions whereas psychopathy is negatively related to extroversion.

Also of particular note is how each member of The Dark Triad is differentially related to different forms of impulsivity. Scott J. Dickman differentiates between two different forms of impulsivity: functional impulsivity and dysfunctional impulsivity. Functional impulsivity is related to idea generation, enthusiasm, adventurousness, and the ability to make quick decisions. On the other hand, dysfunctional impulsivity is related to erratic disorderliness, distraction, and inaccurate decision making.

To see how each of the members of The Dark Triad is related to impulsivity, Daniel N. Jones and Delroy L. Paulhus recently administered a battery of Dark Triad and impulsivity tests to 142 undergraduates as well as 329 adults in the community. Their measure of Psychopathy included four components: erratic lifestyle (e.g., "I am a rebellious person"), interpersonal manipulation (e.g., "I would get a kick out of 'scamming' someone"), callous affect ("e.g., "Most people are wimps"), and antisocial behavior (e.g., "I have tricked someone into giving me money"). They found that all four components of Psychopathy were extremely highly related to one another. Their measure of Machiavellianism included items such as "Anyone who completely trusts anyone else is asking for trouble" and their measure of narcissism included items such as "I like to be the center of attention". Finally, their measure of functional impulsivity included items such as "Most of the time, I can put my thoughts into words very rapidly", whereas their measure of dysfunctional impulsivity included items such as "I often get into trouble because I do not think before I act."

Even though the inter-correlations among the members of the Dark Triad were higher in the community sample, they found a similar pattern of results for both the student and community sample. Both narcissistic and psychopathic individuals tended to show higher levels of overall impulsivity. More telling though were correlations with the different types of impulsivity. Psychopathy was primarily associated with dysfunctional impulsivity, whereas narcissism was primarily related to functional impulsivity. Interestingly, Machavellianism was unrelated to either type of impulsivity.

According to the researchers, these results help explain why narcissism is a mixed blessing. In situations where accuracy is less important than speedy responses (e.g., short-term social interactions), functional impulsivity will be adaptive for narcissists. Over time, though, even functional impulsivity will start to show detrimental effects on interpersonal relationships.

The link between psychopathy and dysfunctional impulsivity is consistent with other research showing that psychopaths lack the ability to inhibit their antisocial impulses. The lack of relation between impulsivity and Machiavellianism is interesting and the researchers suggest that Machiavellian individuals may have an advantage over psychopaths and narcissists because their moderate impulse control may allow them to "refrain from counterproductive behaviors despite their selfish intentions".

The researchers conclude,

"Taken together, our two studies add to the accumulating evidence that the Dark Triad members have unique personality styles favoring different life outcomes. Each member has a unique social engagement style that might prove adaptive in some situations but maladaptive in others."

By studying beautiful minds as well as not-so beautiful minds, I think we can come to a more nuanced and richer understanding of human nature and the various paths by which people obtain their goals.(citation)

And it's exactly through the moral neutral that is our cultural legacy, where we can master the social process of empathy and altruism, starting with an education reform. Which Sir Ken Robinson had explained rather well in his TED Talk called Changing education paradigms. That "the problem is they are trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past." While "on the way they are alienating millions of kids who don't see any purpose in going to school."

I believe we need our children to surpass ourselves as future leaders in a global community, which means we need to cultivate them within a cultural legacy of leadership based on "listen, learn, then lead".

And you have to watch and take care of each other. I probably learned the most about relationships. I learned they are the sinew which hold the force together. I grew up much of my career in the Ranger regiment. And every morning in the Ranger regiment, every Ranger -- and there are more than 2,000 of them -- says a six-stanza Ranger creed. You may know one line of it, it says, "I'll never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy." And it's not a mindless mantra, and it's not a poem. It's a promise. Every Ranger promises every other Ranger now matter what happens, no matter what it costs me, if you need me, I'm coming. And every Ranger gets that same promise from every other Ranger. Think about it. It's extraordinarily powerful. It's probably more powerful than marriage vows. And they've lived up to it, which gives it special power. And so the organizational relationship that bonds them is just amazing.

And I learned personal relationships were more important than ever. We were in a difficult operation in Afghanistan in 2007, and an old friend of mine, that I had spent many years at various points of my career with -- godfather to one of their kids -- he sent me a note, just in an envelope, that had a quote from Sherman to Grant that said, "I knew if I ever got in a tight spot, that you would come, if alive." And having that kind of relationship, for me, turned out to be critical at many points in my career.

And I learned that you have to give that in this environment, because it's tough. That was my journey. I hope it's not over. I came to believe that a leader isn't good because they're right; they're good because they're willing to learn and to trust. This isn't easy stuff. It's not like that electronic abs machine where, 15 minutes a month, you get washboard abs. And it isn't always fair. You can get knocked down, and it hurts and it leaves scars. But if you're a leader, the people you've counted on will help you up. And if you're a leader, the people who count on you need you on your feet.(citation)

That's not cultural legacy grounded in academics, but rather it's about ethics and empathy. Which is rightfully so considering the next revolutionary shift in learning global politics through complex, engaging, and dynamic "World Peace" game.

And so this World Peace Game I'd like to tell you about. It started out like this: it's just a four-foot by five-foot plywood board in an inner-city urban school, 1978. I was creating a lesson for students on Africa. We put all the problems of the world there, and I thought, let's let them solve it. I didn't want to lecture or have just book reading. I wanted to have them be immersed and learn the feeling of learning through their bodies. So I thought, well they like to play games. I'll make something -- I didn't say interactive. We didn't have that term in 1978 -- but something interactive. And so we made the game, and it has since evolved to a four-foot by four-foot by four-foot Plexiglass structure. And it has four Plexiglass layers.

There's an outer space layer with black holes and satellites and research satellites and asteroid mining. There's an air and space level with clouds that are big puffs of cotton we push around and territorial air spaces and air forces, a ground and sea level with thousands of game pieces on it -- even an undersea level with submarines and undersea mining. There are four countries around the board. The kids make up the names of the countries -- some are rich some are poor. They have different assets, commercial and military. And each country has a cabinet. There's a prime minister, secretary of state, minister of defense and a CFO, or comptroller. I choose the prime minister based on my relationship with them. I offer them the job, they can turn it down, and then they choose their own cabinet. There's a World Bank, arms dealers and a United Nations. There's also a weather goddess who controls a random stock market and random weather.

That's not all. And then there's a 13-page crisis document with 50 interlocking problems. So that, if one thing changes, everything else changes. I throw them into this complex matrix, and they trust me because we have a deep, rich relationship together. And so with all these crises, we have -- let's see -- ethnic and minority tensions; we have chemical and nuclear spills, nuclear proliferation. There's oil spills, environmental disasters, water rights disputes, breakaway republics, famine, endangered species and global warming. If Al Gore is here, I'm going to send my fourth-graders from Agnor-Hurt and Venable school to you because they solved global warming in a week. And they've done it several times too.

So I also have in the game a saboteur -- some child -- it's basically a troublemaker -- and I have my troublemaker put to use because they, on the surface, are trying to save the world and their position in the game. But they're also trying to undermine everything in the game. And they do it secretly through misinformation and ambiguities and irrelevancies, trying to cause everyone to think more deeply. The saboteur is there, and we also read from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War." Fourth-graders understand it -- nine years old -- and they handle that and use that to understand how to, not follow -- at first they do -- the paths to power and destruction, the path to war. They learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking, to think in a long-term, more consequential way.(citation)

So that's one example of how to cultivate ethics and empathy within children through self-guided social gaming. But what about academic learning that's insofar had always been done in a dehumanizing, individualistic, and atomized environment? Well one Salman Khan has an interesting and innovative alternative in his TED Talk called Let's use video to reinvent education.

The other thing that happened -- and even at this point, I said, "Okay, maybe it's a good supplement. It's good for motivated students. It's good for maybe home schoolers." But I didn't think it would be something that would somehow penetrate the classroom. But then I started getting letters from teachers. And the teachers would write, saying, "We use your videos to flip the classroom. You've given the lectures, so now what we do ... " and this could happen in every classroom in America tomorrow, " ... what I do is I assign the lectures for homework. And what used to be homework, I now have the students doing in the classroom."

And I want to pause here for a second, because there's a couple of interesting things. One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit -- the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did. They can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. But the more interesting thing is -- and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom -- by removing the one size fits all lecture from the classroom and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, and then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom. They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience -- 30 kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other. A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one size fits all lecture to 30 students -- blank faces, slightly antagonistic -- and now it's a human experience. Now they're actually interacting with each other.

So once the Khan Academy -- I quit my job and we turned into a real organization -- we're a not-for-profit -- the question is, how do we take this to the next level? How do we take what those teachers are doing to their natural conclusion? And so what I'm showing you over here, these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins. The ones I started were much more primitive. This is a more competent version of it. But the paradigm here is, we'll generate as many questions as you need until you get that concept, until you get 10 in a row. And the Khan Academy videos are there. You get hints, the actual steps for that problem, if you don't know how to do it. But the paradigm here, it seems like a very simple thing: 10 in a row, you move on. But it's fundamentally different than what's happening in classrooms right now.

In a traditional classroom, you have a couple of homework, homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. And that exam, whether you get a 70 percent, an 80 percent, a 90 percent, or a 95 percent, the class moves on to the next topic. And even that 95 percent student, what was the five percent they didn't know? Maybe they didn't know what happens when you raise something to the zero power. And then you go build on that in the next concept. That's analogous to imagine learning to ride a bicycle, and maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time, and I give you that bicycle for two weeks. And then I come back after two weeks, and I say, "Well, let's see. You're having trouble taking left turns. You can't quite stop. You're an 80 percent bicyclist." So I put a big C stamp on your forehead and then I say, "Here's a unicycle." But as ridiculous as that sounds, that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now. And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of a sudden and start failing calculus all of a sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers. And it's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation. So our model is learn math the way you'd learn anything, like the way you would learn a bicycle. Stay on that bicycle. Fall off that bicycle. Do it as long as necessary until you have mastery. The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to failure. But we do expect mastery.

This is just another one of the modules. This is trigonometry. This is shifting and reflecting functions. And they all fit together. We have about 90 of these right now. And you can go to the site right now. It's all free. Not trying to sell anything. But the general idea is that they all fit into this knowledge map. That top node right there, that's literally single digit addition. It's like one plus one is equal to two. And the paradigm is, once you get 10 in a row on that, it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules. So if you keep further down the knowledge map, we're getting into more advanced arithmetic. Further down, you start getting into pre-algebra and early algebra. Further down, you start getting into algebra one, algebra two, a little bit of precalculus. And the idea is, from this we can actually teach everything -- well, everything that can be taught in this type of a framework. So you can imagine -- and this is what we are working on -- is from this knowledge map you have logic, you have computer programming, you have grammar, you have genetics, all based off of that core of, if you know this and that, now you're ready for this next concept. Now that can work well for an individual learner, and I encourage, one, for you to do it with your kids, but I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself. It'll change what happens at the dinner table.

But what we want to do is to use the natural conclusion of the flipping of the classroom that those early teachers had emailed me about. And so what I'm showing you here, this is actually data from a pilot in the Los Altos school district, where they took two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes and completely gutted their old math curriculum. These kids aren't using textbooks, they're not getting one size fits all lectures. They're doing Khan Academy, they're doing that software, for roughly half of their math class. And I want to make it clear, we don't view this as the complete math education. What it does is -- and this is what's happening in Los Altos -- it frees up time. This is the blocking and tackling, making sure you know how to move through a system of equations, and it frees up time for the simulations, for the games, for the mechanics, for the robot building, for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow.

And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day, every kid works at their own pace -- and this is actually a live dashboard from Los Altos school district -- and they look at this dashboard. Every row is a student. Every column is one of those concepts. Green means the student's already proficient. Blue means they're working on it -- no need to worry. Red means they're stuck. And what the teacher does is literally just say, "Let me intervene on the red kids." Or even better, "Let me get one of the green kids who are already proficient in that concept to be the first line of attack and actually tutor their peer."

Now I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "Oh, what do you not understand?" or "What do you do understand?" and all of the rest. So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers with as much data as possible -- really data that, in almost any other field, is expected, if you're in finance or marketing or manufacturing. And so the teachers can actually diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible. So now the teachers know exactly what the students have been up to, how long they have been spending every day, what videos have they been watching, when did they pause the videos, what did they stop watching, what exercises are they using, what have they been focused on? The outer circle shows what exercises they were focused on. The inner circle shows what videos they're focused on. And the data gets pretty granular so you can see the exact problems that the student got right or wrong. Red is wrong, blue is right. The leftmost question is the first question that the student attempted. They watched the video right over there. And then you can see, eventually, they were able to get 10 in a row. It's almost like you can see them learning over those last 10 problems. They also got faster. The height is how long it took them.

So when you talk about self-paced learning, it makes sense for everyone -- in education-speak, differentiated learning -- but it's kind of crazy when you see it in a classroom. Because every time we've done this, in every classroom we've done, over and over again, if you go five days into it, there's a group of kids who've raced ahead and there's a group of kids who are a little bit slower. And in a traditional model, if you did a snapshot assessment, you say, "These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids. Maybe they should be tracked differently. Maybe we should put them in different classes." But when you let every student work at their own pace -- and we see it over and over and over again -- you see students who took a little bit extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead. And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted. And we're seeing it over and over and over again. And it makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefitted from were really just due to a coincidence of time.

Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale, what's happening in education. And actually, that kind of brings an interesting point. A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom is focused on student-to-teacher ratios. In our mind, the relevant metric is student-to-valuable-human-time- with-the-teacher ratio. So in a traditional model, most of the teacher's time is spent giving lectures and grading and whatnot. Maybe five percent of their time is actually sitting next to students and actually working with them. Now 100 percent of their time is. So once again, using technology, not just flipping the classroom, you're humanizing the classroom, I'd argue, by a factor of five or 10.(citation)

By now I hope that some of you might have spotted the pattern of how a resource-based development process is emerging from this real-time data-centric, yet humane and sociable learning experience. And how smoothly they all integrate into the human intrinsic motivators of autonomy through self-paced lectures, mastery through peer-support, and propose through community/team building technologies.

Finally, this abundance of genuine human capital and intellectual surplus can transform our world through open-source economy. When economic growth had always based on the carrying capacity of the Earth's finite and renewable resources to generate energysurpluses. Not fiat money as debt with interest. And while we've already went beyond peak oil, our civilization has yet to progress itself beyond its oil dependency. Moreover, our prosperity is based on the sustainability and energy efficiency of our complex culture. And not the preservation of a monetary system that creates money out of thin air.

So, you answer to curb the natural self-interest of some is the indoctrination of all? The process seems to be, first, that they must listen closely to their teacher- reasonable- then, they must submit themselves to his ideas, and then they must apply what they submitted themselves to. Take the world peace affair you have mentioned- lenghtily- the student must first listen with awe at their teacher, submit themselves to his wise commands, let him choose a leader among thier pseudo-micronation, submit themselves to the establishment he has establish, then lead and live within the establishment that he created. I cannot say that I am totally convinced of this system to instill the values of virtue, charity, altruism, and honesty in our children, mainly because, when press to accept a value, I have no doubt that some will rebel, and stray far into the other direction.

This dungeon, for it is thus, would not instill the necessary values that is needed to all children for this to work. Being so, and shedding the individual for the community, let us ignore the obvious difficulty of overhaulling an overhaul of our educational system and turning to something more akin to forcing Children to pledge themselves to the Motherland and the Government- or the T'sar, or the Emperor, or that stand in of the government, the Flag- than something that promotes anything genuinely intelligent. You suppose that we should base our economy on Energy- where does "Want" play in? Even the best of us have wants- and many of us have wants beyond the simple feeling of community or spirituality- I have energy and food (pretend we already figured out how to effectively distribute them in the best possible way and in the most efficient possible manner), how would my desire for something else get satisfied? Do we barter- the problem has already been discussed in more detail previously- or, more likely, do we turn to money? Do we have a commodity monetary unit- what should it be? Food and Energy? Certainly, if we are in a community with sufficient Food and Energy, even if we have finally figured out a way to trade energy, we would have no want of it, because there is sufficient amount of it, and it is completely valueless because it is so abundant. Maybe I am interpreting it all wrong, and thus, I am not convinced of its merit. Maybe there is something that I have missed, and, should I see it more clearly, I would be absolutely convinced. Maybe I need it put in more lucid language. No matter, I am still unconvinced.

The part in red might jog your interest. Until then, you can try to argue how the natural self-interest for human beings as themselves social animals, within the context of social science and neuroscience, isn'tbelongingness.

So, you would have the world become one in thought and mind, and submit themselves unto Lord Jacques Fresco- as far as his resource based economy is concerned, I see nothing in it. I have already listed my objections to the idea that all resources should be redistributed according to the whims of a mysterious entity- you haven't made it clear who- who redistribute it for the best of all. Then you haven't answered how wants are satisfied- how should I trade when the chances of mutual interest is exceedingly low. As for psychology, I am totally ignorant of it, but that I am quite sure that there is more to desire than the wish to belong- the wish to obtain, for example.

Why bother? When you declared your ignorance on the subject of holistic socioeconomic within the context of nature itself. While you're fearful of a conspiracy that's not even there, simply because the emergence of biomimicry is transparent for all through the process of the scientific method, and through trial and error. The fact is no finance nor politics can ever convince you otherwise, simply because you're afraid of the unknown caused by your willful ignorance.

Finally, when nihilism is your only line of defense. Don't even contradict yourself with your line of questioning about wants, interests, trades, or even purposes. At least commodity traders would tell lies to themselves, when in fact they're banking on the possibility of another financial collapse. They're opportunistic when it comes to themselves benefiting and profiting from crisis caused by people's fear, and you're helping them with your fear induced ignorance.

Am I to open my mind to the new idea of letting someone else think for me? Forgive me for not understanding how his idea is to work, though, in my own defence, you have not quite explain it with the necessary lucidity required for my, or indeed, anyone's understanding of it. Indeed, I suspect that there isn't much in it, otherwise you would not write as the modern French philosophers, choked it up in jargon from head to foot. But, the lack of clarity aside, I am indeed fearful of conspiracy, for when an entity is entrusted with redistributing the resources and energy fairly and appropriately, there is too much power vested upon this centralised authority, to the detriment of the powers of the individual- unless you want a collective mindset bowing to this single power, and put a child-like faith in its capacity for fair, sustainable, and equal distribution.

This fearfulness is perfectly founded from an intellectual perspective, the fear that if too much authority is vested in a single entity or group of entities, it can, and usually does, corrupt into authoritarianism- a quick browse through any respectable history would procure examples from businessmen to statesmen to lords and ladies, &c. I do not see how this is nihilistic- if we take nihilism to mean that there is no morals or purpose in the world. I don't quite think that anything I have written thus far can suggest this viewpoint. Let us pretend I have said that, how does that interfer with my argument that your equation seems to ignore the possibility of material want, and put every want into that narrow realm of belongingness? Am I to believe there is not desire beyond that? I am sure there are psychologist a-plenty who would agree with me on this issue.

But, then again, you are quite right in chatising me for being ignorant- and my ignorance may well make me, a single individual with little standing in the world, a unwitting servant of this cabal of evil, monacled men with twirling moustachios. The fact that they are evil or that I am a pawn does not play any part in the inherent weaknesses of your arguments. I therefore stand still unconvinced as I was before, but, if you are able to provide Jacques Fresco plan in detail and explaination as to why it would work, I am more than willing to hear it out.

The two proposed solution, as far as I understand it, to America's unemployment, and correct me if I am wrong, seems to be:

a) Stimulate the Economy by printing and throwing as much money as possible at the economy, and hope that, by increasing the amount of money avaliable, people will purchase, creating demand, and thus creating jobs to supply those demands. Because America is so patriotic that people only buy American, even when faced with cheaper Indian, Vietnamese, or Chinese products. This is the policy, I think, our judicious leaders have taken.

b) Let the market regulate itself, because workers will, when faced with unemployment, accept lower wages, and companies will hire them all, even if there is no demand for their product, and we are restored to that happy and blissful seat- in short, it is the best of all possible worlds, and everything lines to create the best of all possible endings.

What do you think is the right policy our nation should take in such a crisis as this?

A. would lead to inflation, last thing we need is for the price of meat to go from 5.99$ To 9.99$. this will force more people out of work....not fix anything. B. woulld be a better choice of the twobut there is better choices. 1 being the removal of most goverment programs the cost the tax payers... next would be to invest in companies that can make money through trade with other countries. As A scientist i will point out inclosed systems fail. the same goes for communities and governments.

Have you not heard of the magical Phillip's curve?

During the late fifties, British economist A.W. Phillips empirically stumbled upon an inverse relationship between unemployment and wages after plotting the figure on a graph. Economist soon realise that this relationship could be found everywhere, and soon, they connected that with inflation and a nifty explaination- as employment rise, the strenght of the labourers is greater, thus, they can raise wages. But the employers realising that this would make them less profit, would raise prices, and the workers, again, realising that this would in fact make their new gain in higher wages not really exist (if prices go up, and wage goes up in the same proportion, there is no gain) if this happens, so they go back to the table, &c. and soon, this will lead to inflation. Likewise, when there is unemployment, deflation occurs because, there being less workers, the workers are willing to work for lower wages, prices will drop, and deflation occurs. Thus, it falls to reason that there is a trade-off between inflation and employment- at least in the short term. The solution is then is to create short term inflation to stimulate the economy, create employment, &c. &c. By creating more money, the people would have more spending power, which will lead to greater purchase, and more demand. So, in effect, the government, in respect to their recent Stimulus and their printing of money, have giant lump of bronze, and they hope that it will seperate itself into copper and tin. Of course, I am no economist, and my explanation may be completely incorrect.

There's at least two problems with that "creating more money" process, when a fiat currency like the US Dollars is made of debt: one is the real physical limitation of our planet's carrying capacity simply cannot sustain an infinite growth.

These monetary learnings allow us to formulate two more extremely important Key Concepts.

The first is that all dollars are backed by debt. At the local bank level, all new money is loaned into existence. At the Federal Reserve level, money is simply manufactured out of thin air and then exchanged for interest-paying government debt. In both cases, the money is backed by debt. Debt that pays interest. From this Key Concept, we can formulate a truly profound statement, which is that at a minimum, each year enough new money must be loaned into existence to cover the interest payments on all of the past outstanding debt.

If we flip this slightly, we can say that each year all the outstanding debt must compound by at least the rate of the interest on that debt. Each and every year it must grow by some percentage. Because our debt-based money system is growing by some percentage continually, it is an exponential system by its very design. A corollary of this is that the amount of debt in the system will always exceed the amount of money.

I am not going to cast judgment on this and say that it is good or it is bad. It simply is what it is. By understanding its design, though, you will be better equipped to understand that the potential range of future outcomes for our economy are not limitless, but rather bounded by the rules of the system.

All of which leads us to the fourth Key Concept, which is that perpetual expansion is a requirement of modern banking. In fact we can make a rule: Each year, new credit (loans) must be made that at least equal the amount of all the outstanding interest payments that year. Without a continuous expansion of the money supply, past debts would not be able to be serviced, and defaults would ripple through, and possibly destroy, the entire system. Defaults are the Achilles heel of a debt-based money system, which we saw in our local banking example in the previous chapter. Because of this, all the institutional and political forces in our society are geared towards avoiding this outcome.

So the banking system must continually expand – not necessarily because it is the right (or wrong) thing to do, but, rather, simply because that is how it was designed. It is a feature of the system, just like using gasoline is a feature of my car’s engine. I might wish and hope that my car would run on straw, but I’d be wasting my time, because that’s just not how it was designed.

By understanding the requirement for continual expansion, we will be in a better position to make informed decisions about what’s likely to transpire and take meaningful actions to enhance our prospects.

More philosophically, we might wonder about the long-term viability of a system that must expand exponentially but which exists on a spherical planet. The key question is, “Can our current money system somehow be modified to be stable, fair, and useful when it is not growing?”

So the question is this: What happens when a human-contrived money system that must expand, by its very design, runs headlong into the physical limits of a spherical planet?(citation)

And two is the historical destruction of the currency itself due to hyperinflation.

It is crucially important that a nation’s money supply is carefully managed, for if it is not, the monetary unit can be destroyed by inflation. In fact, there are over 3,800 past examples of paper currencies that no longer exist. There are numerous examples from the United States, which may have some collector value but no longer possess any monetary value. Of course, I could just as easily display beautiful but no longer functional examples from Argentina, Bolivia, and Columbia, and a hundred other places

How does a hyperinflationary destruction of a currency happen?

Here’s a relatively recent example that comes from Yugoslavia between the years 1988 and 1995. Pre-1990, the Yugoslavian dinar had measurable value: You could actually buy something with one. However, throughout the 1980’s, the Yugoslavian government ran a persistent budget deficit and printed money to make up the shortfall. By the early 1990’s, the government had used up all its own hard currency reserves, and they proceeded to loot the private accounts of citizens. In order to keep things moving along, successively larger bills had to be printed, finally culminating in this stunning example – a 500 billion dinar note. At its height, inflation in Yugoslavia was running at over 37% per day. This means prices were doubling every 48 hours or so.

Let me see if I can make that more concrete for you. Suppose that on January 1, 2007, you had a penny and could find something to purchase with it. At 37% per day inflation, by April 3, 2007 you’d need one of these – a billion dollar bill – to purchase the very same item. In reverse, if you’d had a billion dollars on January 1st stuffed in a suitcase, by April 3rd you’d have had a penny’s worth of purchasing power left.

Clearly, if you’d attempted to save money during this period of time, you’d have lost it all, so we can safely state that inflationary money regimes impose a penalty on savers. The opposite side of this is that inflationary money regimes promote spending and require that money be invested or speculated, so as to at least have the chance of keeping pace with inflation. Of course, investing and speculating involve risks, so we can broaden this statement to include the claim that inflationary monetary systems require the citizens living within them to subject their hard-earned savings to risk.

That is worth pondering for a minute or two.

Even more importantly, since history shows how common it is for currencies to be mismanaged, we need to keep a careful eye on the stewards of our money to make sure they are not being irresponsible by creating too much money out of thin air and thereby destroying our savings, culture, and institutions by the process of inflation.(citation)

That's why a fiat currency is doomed to fail by its very design. And now with electronic payment system, hyperinflation can run its course without relying on printing large bills.

Jacob Goldstein: Because now, if you think of most of the money that you have, or most of the money that I have, it's never currency. I get paid. That is just a direct deposit from NPR, from my employer, to my checking account. It's not like they give me a bunch of hundred dollar bills every week. And then, I pay my bills online. So currency even now is like old-fashioned. You don't have to touch money. You don't have to see it. It's just information.Money is just an abstract and arbitrary made-belief, there's no intrinsic value in a fiat currency we use in the modern world.

Ira Glass: Until this conversation it never occurred to me that money doesn't change hands when we pay our bills online or anything. Like I don't know why I never even stopped to think, right, at no point does the bank go and deliver like $100 to the phone company on my behalf. It really is just numbers going back and forth in the computer.

Jacob Goldstein: Yeah. Nothing happens in the physical world. I mean I guess, except electrical pulses I guess it would be flying back and forth between computers. The money doesn't really exist. Not only is there no gold. There aren't even bills for most of the money that exists. Most of the money that exists is just the idea. It's just the bank saying, yes, there is this much money in your account.(citation)

So in conclusion, Money is just an abstract and arbitrary made-belief, there's no intrinsic value in a fiat currency we use in the modern world. But we're all made to believe that it's somehow important.

The two proposed solution, as far as I understand it, to America's unemployment, and correct me if I am wrong, seems to be:

a) Stimulate the Economy by printing and throwing as much money as possible at the economy, and hope that, by increasing the amount of money avaliable, people will purchase, creating demand, and thus creating jobs to supply those demands. Because America is so patriotic that people only buy American, even when faced with cheaper Indian, Vietnamese, or Chinese products. This is the policy, I think, our judicious leaders have taken.

b) Let the market regulate itself, because workers will, when faced with unemployment, accept lower wages, and companies will hire them all, even if there is no demand for their product, and we are restored to that happy and blissful seat- in short, it is the best of all possible worlds, and everything lines to create the best of all possible endings.

What do you think is the right policy our nation should take in such a crisis as this?

If only people would just see through the entertainment buzz, without themselves being indoctrinated into believing that it's somehow a dirty word. Then hopefully they would realize for themselves that socialism is about establishing an egalitarian society.

So, you would rather us go back to the Gold Standard or to a Commidity Currency system instead of our current Fiat system? I am not quite sure that getting rid of the Fiat Currency, which is simply money which the Government insures is legal tender, would be all that beneficial, being that Gold back currency would deflate the dollar to the point where, while it is worth much more, it is less competitive than- say- every other Fiat currency in the world, that is, every other currency in the world. Let us say we go back to backing our money with Gold, say, at the Bretton-Woods' 35 dollar for every ounce, Gold is, as of today, worth at around 1800$. That would make a single of our hypothetical dollar worth around 50 of our current dollar, and a single hypothetical cent worth around fifty cents. And, because there is only a limited supply of Gold in our Goverment treasury, Money becomes even more scarce. I do not think that massive deflation is the way to go. We may as well go back to the Pound, divide that into crowns, half-crowns, shillings, sixpence, thrupence, tuppence, penny, ha'penny, fathings, half-farthings and, if that is not enough, quarter-farthings if we do.

No. Not when all money become a useless and arbitrary bartering system in a resource/energy(not monetary) based economy. It can't measure electricity by watts, food by nutritional facts, civilization by prosperity, health and wellness by freedom from diseases, human flourishing by humanity, nor sustainability by bio diversity. It's a cultural legacy of no intrinsic usefulness or value within the context of nature.

So, you want to get rid of money in general, and replace that with the redistribution of energy and resources? That would have to be on an international level, because countries, in general, do not produce all of the resources it needs. Who will be the one to decide the most efficient distribution? The government? Let us assume the government is in charge of all this, and that we elect the government, who is to say that we should be able to trust them? Or that there is someone more qualified to resdistribute weath than ourselves? But, say it works, and that there is a egality in the distribution, then how would the system cope with this human disire known as 'want'? For example, how would it cope with the 'I want this, and he has it'? Obviously, we can have a system where we make everyone into selfless caring people, either by trying to eliminate the greed they have through Fun-Camps and Friendly-Land, and then everyone will all be happy nice people who give what they have to someone else who wants it, and that person would carefully accept and will be able to do the same if given the chance, which bascially amounts to brainwashing, or we could barter our tangible resources, for example, fifty bushel of wheat and a door-nail, in exchange for other tangible resources, say Milton's Paradise Lost and Hustler's magazine issue 205. That depends on the existence of Reciprocated and Mutual desire, with both parties desiring what the other has, for example, I may want Milton and Hustler, but the other fellow may not want wheat or door nails. That is why we have money, because it eliminates the need of mutual and reciprocated desire for transaction, money, either commidity based or fiat based, has the property of being able to procure objects, and has the property of procuring object- that is, it is valid now, and can be valid in the future- though, that also depends on the confidence in the money's ability. Most Socialist, including the most famous, Charles Henry Marx (an anglicisation of his name, you may well note), have been wise enough to induce the utility of money within any economic system dependant the human emotion known as 'desire', that is, almost all economic system. Even at the most primitive level, desire is the core of all economic transaction. Then, if this problem does not exist, then there is the problem of how to get there. Do we go there immediately, and rush to where angels dare not tread, or do we arrive there in graduations.

Brainwashing? Well talk about your irony. When the fact is your false-positive superstition on mere "desire" as human nature, is but a naturalistic fallacy within the context of social psychology and neuroscience. When the fact is humans as social animals both desire and need the experience of belongingness, not mere material possession.

Belonging-ness as a Basic Need

Just as protein is needed in the diet for the health of the body, so belongingness is a basic need for the mind and soul. In the early years of the study of depth psychology, different innovators explored our “basic” motivations. Freud suggested sex and aggression as two key drives, Alfred Adler noted the seeking of the sense of superiority to counter inferiority feelings, and Jung noted a wide range of archetypal sources of motivation. Others also came up with their suggestions.

By the 1940s, though, child development research had considered another interesting disease that was prevalent again in orphanages, variously called "hospitalism," "anaclitic depression", or “marasmus," and describing the way some babies became sickly and often died! They traced this not to not being fed, but not being sufficiently cuddled, touched, played with! Other researchers supported the growing need for contact—and this in some ways was in contrast to a fashion in the child-rearing texts of the 1920s and 1930s to not pick up the crying child lest he be “spoiled.” (The success of the Doctor Spock books in the late 1940s was due to his challenging this anti-spoiling regiment. Benjamin Spock didn’t support “permissiveness” as his enemies accused, but simply not being harshly reserved.)

Psychoanalysts in the 1950s wove such research into revisions of theory, and while some stayed with Freud’s earlier “drive” theories, a fair number came to espouse what came to be called object relations theory. (This term refers to the object of a person’s love—and/or hate—, but many think of objects as inanimate, so the term is somewhat somewhat misleading; the theory itself seeks to highlight the intensity and depth of interpersonal relations.)

Much of object relations theory originally was based on observations about the interactions of infants and young children and their parents or caretakers, but what should be realized as that these early bonding experiences, with all their ups and downs, is only a small part of the richness of the dynamic! By age four to six, young children expand the scope of their worlds to include wider circles of friends, neighbors, and more abstract entities. Kids hear about and begin to root for the teams their parents root for, begin to relate to the family’s or communities myths about gods or spiritual entities, partake of ethnic identities, and feel patriotism and other sorts of loyalty. The term, belongingness, then, is more understandable and inclusive of our broader, more complex and life-long needs for feeling connected.(citation)

However, that human need for the experience of belongingness through social connection got highjacked by the psychotic corporate cultural practice of perception management from cradle to grave. AKA your "Fun-Camps" and "Friendly-Land" created by the corporations. When they basically socialized our children that in order for them to be worthy of belongingness, they need to possess their products, while compete in an arbitrary social hierarchy of vanity and shallowness.

Actually, I never said it is in man's nature to 'desire', but that desire, as in material desire, is the driving force of all economic transaction. Maybe there are people simply content with the satisfaction of 'Belonging'- whether to a community, a religion, a family, what ever, but, it is also true that some people have material want. It is not an illusion created by the corporations, material wants is what drove trade since the beginning of time, before the creation of corporations, before Capitalism, etc. But all this still avoids the question that I posit, how does your proposed system work? How does it overcome those limitations? How do we get to it? If it doesn't answer those question, it cannot work as an economic model.

The psychological dark triad of a personality continuum for narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy does predate the creation of corporations, governments, and capitalism as systems of modern society. When these ideas as dangerous memes are only the manifestos of said evil personalities, which later on became their own cultural legacies and social processes for evil.

The common thread running through all three traits of The Dark Triad (Machiavellianism, subclinical narcissism, and subclinical psychopathy) is high selfishness and low disagreeableness. Still, the three traits are only moderately correlated with one another, and recently researchers have started to assess the independent predictions of each separately from the others, and how people with a different balance of the Dark Triad go about obtaining their goals differently. For instance, recent research conducted by Peter Jonason, Glenn Geher, and myself suggests that narcissism is tied most heavily to extroversion and a desire to engage in social interactions whereas psychopathy is negatively related to extroversion.

Also of particular note is how each member of The Dark Triad is differentially related to different forms of impulsivity. Scott J. Dickman differentiates between two different forms of impulsivity: functional impulsivity and dysfunctional impulsivity. Functional impulsivity is related to idea generation, enthusiasm, adventurousness, and the ability to make quick decisions. On the other hand, dysfunctional impulsivity is related to erratic disorderliness, distraction, and inaccurate decision making.

To see how each of the members of The Dark Triad is related to impulsivity, Daniel N. Jones and Delroy L. Paulhus recently administered a battery of Dark Triad and impulsivity tests to 142 undergraduates as well as 329 adults in the community. Their measure of Psychopathy included four components: erratic lifestyle (e.g., "I am a rebellious person"), interpersonal manipulation (e.g., "I would get a kick out of 'scamming' someone"), callous affect ("e.g., "Most people are wimps"), and antisocial behavior (e.g., "I have tricked someone into giving me money"). They found that all four components of Psychopathy were extremely highly related to one another. Their measure of Machiavellianism included items such as "Anyone who completely trusts anyone else is asking for trouble" and their measure of narcissism included items such as "I like to be the center of attention". Finally, their measure of functional impulsivity included items such as "Most of the time, I can put my thoughts into words very rapidly", whereas their measure of dysfunctional impulsivity included items such as "I often get into trouble because I do not think before I act."

Even though the inter-correlations among the members of the Dark Triad were higher in the community sample, they found a similar pattern of results for both the student and community sample. Both narcissistic and psychopathic individuals tended to show higher levels of overall impulsivity. More telling though were correlations with the different types of impulsivity. Psychopathy was primarily associated with dysfunctional impulsivity, whereas narcissism was primarily related to functional impulsivity. Interestingly, Machavellianism was unrelated to either type of impulsivity.

According to the researchers, these results help explain why narcissism is a mixed blessing. In situations where accuracy is less important than speedy responses (e.g., short-term social interactions), functional impulsivity will be adaptive for narcissists. Over time, though, even functional impulsivity will start to show detrimental effects on interpersonal relationships.

The link between psychopathy and dysfunctional impulsivity is consistent with other research showing that psychopaths lack the ability to inhibit their antisocial impulses. The lack of relation between impulsivity and Machiavellianism is interesting and the researchers suggest that Machiavellian individuals may have an advantage over psychopaths and narcissists because their moderate impulse control may allow them to "refrain from counterproductive behaviors despite their selfish intentions".

The researchers conclude,

"Taken together, our two studies add to the accumulating evidence that the Dark Triad members have unique personality styles favoring different life outcomes. Each member has a unique social engagement style that might prove adaptive in some situations but maladaptive in others."

By studying beautiful minds as well as not-so beautiful minds, I think we can come to a more nuanced and richer understanding of human nature and the various paths by which people obtain their goals.(citation)

And it's exactly through the moral neutral that is our cultural legacy, where we can master the social process of empathy and altruism, starting with an education reform. Which Sir Ken Robinson had explained rather well in his TED Talk called Changing education paradigms. That "the problem is they are trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past." While "on the way they are alienating millions of kids who don't see any purpose in going to school."

I believe we need our children to surpass ourselves as future leaders in a global community, which means we need to cultivate them within a cultural legacy of leadership based on "listen, learn, then lead".

And you have to watch and take care of each other. I probably learned the most about relationships. I learned they are the sinew which hold the force together. I grew up much of my career in the Ranger regiment. And every morning in the Ranger regiment, every Ranger -- and there are more than 2,000 of them -- says a six-stanza Ranger creed. You may know one line of it, it says, "I'll never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy." And it's not a mindless mantra, and it's not a poem. It's a promise. Every Ranger promises every other Ranger now matter what happens, no matter what it costs me, if you need me, I'm coming. And every Ranger gets that same promise from every other Ranger. Think about it. It's extraordinarily powerful. It's probably more powerful than marriage vows. And they've lived up to it, which gives it special power. And so the organizational relationship that bonds them is just amazing.

And I learned personal relationships were more important than ever. We were in a difficult operation in Afghanistan in 2007, and an old friend of mine, that I had spent many years at various points of my career with -- godfather to one of their kids -- he sent me a note, just in an envelope, that had a quote from Sherman to Grant that said, "I knew if I ever got in a tight spot, that you would come, if alive." And having that kind of relationship, for me, turned out to be critical at many points in my career.

And I learned that you have to give that in this environment, because it's tough. That was my journey. I hope it's not over. I came to believe that a leader isn't good because they're right; they're good because they're willing to learn and to trust. This isn't easy stuff. It's not like that electronic abs machine where, 15 minutes a month, you get washboard abs. And it isn't always fair. You can get knocked down, and it hurts and it leaves scars. But if you're a leader, the people you've counted on will help you up. And if you're a leader, the people who count on you need you on your feet.(citation)

That's not cultural legacy grounded in academics, but rather it's about ethics and empathy. Which is rightfully so considering the next revolutionary shift in learning global politics through complex, engaging, and dynamic "World Peace" game.

And so this World Peace Game I'd like to tell you about. It started out like this: it's just a four-foot by five-foot plywood board in an inner-city urban school, 1978. I was creating a lesson for students on Africa. We put all the problems of the world there, and I thought, let's let them solve it. I didn't want to lecture or have just book reading. I wanted to have them be immersed and learn the feeling of learning through their bodies. So I thought, well they like to play games. I'll make something -- I didn't say interactive. We didn't have that term in 1978 -- but something interactive. And so we made the game, and it has since evolved to a four-foot by four-foot by four-foot Plexiglass structure. And it has four Plexiglass layers.

There's an outer space layer with black holes and satellites and research satellites and asteroid mining. There's an air and space level with clouds that are big puffs of cotton we push around and territorial air spaces and air forces, a ground and sea level with thousands of game pieces on it -- even an undersea level with submarines and undersea mining. There are four countries around the board. The kids make up the names of the countries -- some are rich some are poor. They have different assets, commercial and military. And each country has a cabinet. There's a prime minister, secretary of state, minister of defense and a CFO, or comptroller. I choose the prime minister based on my relationship with them. I offer them the job, they can turn it down, and then they choose their own cabinet. There's a World Bank, arms dealers and a United Nations. There's also a weather goddess who controls a random stock market and random weather.

That's not all. And then there's a 13-page crisis document with 50 interlocking problems. So that, if one thing changes, everything else changes. I throw them into this complex matrix, and they trust me because we have a deep, rich relationship together. And so with all these crises, we have -- let's see -- ethnic and minority tensions; we have chemical and nuclear spills, nuclear proliferation. There's oil spills, environmental disasters, water rights disputes, breakaway republics, famine, endangered species and global warming. If Al Gore is here, I'm going to send my fourth-graders from Agnor-Hurt and Venable school to you because they solved global warming in a week. And they've done it several times too.

So I also have in the game a saboteur -- some child -- it's basically a troublemaker -- and I have my troublemaker put to use because they, on the surface, are trying to save the world and their position in the game. But they're also trying to undermine everything in the game. And they do it secretly through misinformation and ambiguities and irrelevancies, trying to cause everyone to think more deeply. The saboteur is there, and we also read from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War." Fourth-graders understand it -- nine years old -- and they handle that and use that to understand how to, not follow -- at first they do -- the paths to power and destruction, the path to war. They learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking, to think in a long-term, more consequential way.(citation)

So that's one example of how to cultivate ethics and empathy within children through self-guided social gaming. But what about academic learning that's insofar had always been done in a dehumanizing, individualistic, and atomized environment? Well one Salman Khan has an interesting and innovative alternative in his TED Talk called Let's use video to reinvent education.

The other thing that happened -- and even at this point, I said, "Okay, maybe it's a good supplement. It's good for motivated students. It's good for maybe home schoolers." But I didn't think it would be something that would somehow penetrate the classroom. But then I started getting letters from teachers. And the teachers would write, saying, "We use your videos to flip the classroom. You've given the lectures, so now what we do ... " and this could happen in every classroom in America tomorrow, " ... what I do is I assign the lectures for homework. And what used to be homework, I now have the students doing in the classroom."

And I want to pause here for a second, because there's a couple of interesting things. One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit -- the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did. They can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. But the more interesting thing is -- and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom -- by removing the one size fits all lecture from the classroom and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, and then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom. They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience -- 30 kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other. A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one size fits all lecture to 30 students -- blank faces, slightly antagonistic -- and now it's a human experience. Now they're actually interacting with each other.

So once the Khan Academy -- I quit my job and we turned into a real organization -- we're a not-for-profit -- the question is, how do we take this to the next level? How do we take what those teachers are doing to their natural conclusion? And so what I'm showing you over here, these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins. The ones I started were much more primitive. This is a more competent version of it. But the paradigm here is, we'll generate as many questions as you need until you get that concept, until you get 10 in a row. And the Khan Academy videos are there. You get hints, the actual steps for that problem, if you don't know how to do it. But the paradigm here, it seems like a very simple thing: 10 in a row, you move on. But it's fundamentally different than what's happening in classrooms right now.

In a traditional classroom, you have a couple of homework, homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. And that exam, whether you get a 70 percent, an 80 percent, a 90 percent, or a 95 percent, the class moves on to the next topic. And even that 95 percent student, what was the five percent they didn't know? Maybe they didn't know what happens when you raise something to the zero power. And then you go build on that in the next concept. That's analogous to imagine learning to ride a bicycle, and maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time, and I give you that bicycle for two weeks. And then I come back after two weeks, and I say, "Well, let's see. You're having trouble taking left turns. You can't quite stop. You're an 80 percent bicyclist." So I put a big C stamp on your forehead and then I say, "Here's a unicycle." But as ridiculous as that sounds, that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now. And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of a sudden and start failing calculus all of a sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers. And it's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation. So our model is learn math the way you'd learn anything, like the way you would learn a bicycle. Stay on that bicycle. Fall off that bicycle. Do it as long as necessary until you have mastery. The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to failure. But we do expect mastery.

This is just another one of the modules. This is trigonometry. This is shifting and reflecting functions. And they all fit together. We have about 90 of these right now. And you can go to the site right now. It's all free. Not trying to sell anything. But the general idea is that they all fit into this knowledge map. That top node right there, that's literally single digit addition. It's like one plus one is equal to two. And the paradigm is, once you get 10 in a row on that, it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules. So if you keep further down the knowledge map, we're getting into more advanced arithmetic. Further down, you start getting into pre-algebra and early algebra. Further down, you start getting into algebra one, algebra two, a little bit of precalculus. And the idea is, from this we can actually teach everything -- well, everything that can be taught in this type of a framework. So you can imagine -- and this is what we are working on -- is from this knowledge map you have logic, you have computer programming, you have grammar, you have genetics, all based off of that core of, if you know this and that, now you're ready for this next concept. Now that can work well for an individual learner, and I encourage, one, for you to do it with your kids, but I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself. It'll change what happens at the dinner table.

But what we want to do is to use the natural conclusion of the flipping of the classroom that those early teachers had emailed me about. And so what I'm showing you here, this is actually data from a pilot in the Los Altos school district, where they took two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes and completely gutted their old math curriculum. These kids aren't using textbooks, they're not getting one size fits all lectures. They're doing Khan Academy, they're doing that software, for roughly half of their math class. And I want to make it clear, we don't view this as the complete math education. What it does is -- and this is what's happening in Los Altos -- it frees up time. This is the blocking and tackling, making sure you know how to move through a system of equations, and it frees up time for the simulations, for the games, for the mechanics, for the robot building, for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow.

And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day, every kid works at their own pace -- and this is actually a live dashboard from Los Altos school district -- and they look at this dashboard. Every row is a student. Every column is one of those concepts. Green means the student's already proficient. Blue means they're working on it -- no need to worry. Red means they're stuck. And what the teacher does is literally just say, "Let me intervene on the red kids." Or even better, "Let me get one of the green kids who are already proficient in that concept to be the first line of attack and actually tutor their peer."

Now I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "Oh, what do you not understand?" or "What do you do understand?" and all of the rest. So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers with as much data as possible -- really data that, in almost any other field, is expected, if you're in finance or marketing or manufacturing. And so the teachers can actually diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible. So now the teachers know exactly what the students have been up to, how long they have been spending every day, what videos have they been watching, when did they pause the videos, what did they stop watching, what exercises are they using, what have they been focused on? The outer circle shows what exercises they were focused on. The inner circle shows what videos they're focused on. And the data gets pretty granular so you can see the exact problems that the student got right or wrong. Red is wrong, blue is right. The leftmost question is the first question that the student attempted. They watched the video right over there. And then you can see, eventually, they were able to get 10 in a row. It's almost like you can see them learning over those last 10 problems. They also got faster. The height is how long it took them.

So when you talk about self-paced learning, it makes sense for everyone -- in education-speak, differentiated learning -- but it's kind of crazy when you see it in a classroom. Because every time we've done this, in every classroom we've done, over and over again, if you go five days into it, there's a group of kids who've raced ahead and there's a group of kids who are a little bit slower. And in a traditional model, if you did a snapshot assessment, you say, "These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids. Maybe they should be tracked differently. Maybe we should put them in different classes." But when you let every student work at their own pace -- and we see it over and over and over again -- you see students who took a little bit extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead. And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted. And we're seeing it over and over and over again. And it makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefitted from were really just due to a coincidence of time.

Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale, what's happening in education. And actually, that kind of brings an interesting point. A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom is focused on student-to-teacher ratios. In our mind, the relevant metric is student-to-valuable-human-time- with-the-teacher ratio. So in a traditional model, most of the teacher's time is spent giving lectures and grading and whatnot. Maybe five percent of their time is actually sitting next to students and actually working with them. Now 100 percent of their time is. So once again, using technology, not just flipping the classroom, you're humanizing the classroom, I'd argue, by a factor of five or 10.(citation)

By now I hope that some of you might have spotted the pattern of how a resource-based development process is emerging from this real-time data-centric, yet humane and sociable learning experience. And how smoothly they all integrate into the human intrinsic motivators of autonomy through self-paced lectures, mastery through peer-support, and propose through community/team building technologies.

Finally, this abundance of genuine human capital and intellectual surplus can transform our world through open-source economy. When economic growth had always based on the carrying capacity of the Earth's finite and renewable resources to generate energysurpluses. Not fiat money as debt with interest. And while we've already went beyond peak oil, our civilization has yet to progress itself beyond its oil dependency. Moreover, our prosperity is based on the sustainability and energy efficiency of our complex culture. And not the preservation of a monetary system that creates money out of thin air.

So, you answer to curb the natural self-interest of some is the indoctrination of all? The process seems to be, first, that they must listen closely to their teacher- reasonable- then, they must submit themselves to his ideas, and then they must apply what they submitted themselves to. Take the world peace affair you have mentioned- lenghtily- the student must first listen with awe at their teacher, submit themselves to his wise commands, let him choose a leader among thier pseudo-micronation, submit themselves to the establishment he has establish, then lead and live within the establishment that he created. I cannot say that I am totally convinced of this system to instill the values of virtue, charity, altruism, and honesty in our children, mainly because, when press to accept a value, I have no doubt that some will rebel, and stray far into the other direction.

This dungeon, for it is thus, would not instill the necessary values that is needed to all children for this to work. Being so, and shedding the individual for the community, let us ignore the obvious difficulty of overhaulling an overhaul of our educational system and turning to something more akin to forcing Children to pledge themselves to the Motherland and the Government- or the T'sar, or the Emperor, or that stand in of the government, the Flag- than something that promotes anything genuinely intelligent. You suppose that we should base our economy on Energy- where does "Want" play in? Even the best of us have wants- and many of us have wants beyond the simple feeling of community or spirituality- I have energy and food (pretend we already figured out how to effectively distribute them in the best possible way and in the most efficient possible manner), how would my desire for something else get satisfied? Do we barter- the problem has already been discussed in more detail previously- or, more likely, do we turn to money? Do we have a commodity monetary unit- what should it be? Food and Energy? Certainly, if we are in a community with sufficient Food and Energy, even if we have finally figured out a way to trade energy, we would have no want of it, because there is sufficient amount of it, and it is completely valueless because it is so abundant. Maybe I am interpreting it all wrong, and thus, I am not convinced of its merit. Maybe there is something that I have missed, and, should I see it more clearly, I would be absolutely convinced. Maybe I need it put in more lucid language. No matter, I am still unconvinced.

The part in red might jog your interest. Until then, you can try to argue how the natural self-interest for human beings as themselves social animals, within the context of social science and neuroscience, isn'tbelongingness.

So, you would have the world become one in thought and mind, and submit themselves unto Lord Jacques Fresco- as far as his resource based economy is concerned, I see nothing in it. I have already listed my objections to the idea that all resources should be redistributed according to the whims of a mysterious entity- you haven't made it clear who- who redistribute it for the best of all. Then you haven't answered how wants are satisfied- how should I trade when the chances of mutual interest is exceedingly low. As for psychology, I am totally ignorant of it, but that I am quite sure that there is more to desire than the wish to belong- the wish to obtain, for example.

Why bother? When you declared your ignorance on the subject of holistic socioeconomic within the context of nature itself. While you're fearful of a conspiracy that's not even there, simply because the emergence of biomimicry is transparent for all through the process of the scientific method, and through trial and error. The fact is no finance nor politics can ever convince you otherwise, simply because you're afraid of the unknown caused by your willful ignorance.

Finally, when nihilism is your only line of defense. Don't even contradict yourself with your line of questioning about wants, interests, trades, or even purposes. At least commodity traders would tell lies to themselves, when in fact they're banking on the possibility of another financial collapse. They're opportunistic when it comes to themselves benefiting and profiting from crisis caused by people's fear, and you're helping them with your fear induced ignorance.

Am I to open my mind to the new idea of letting someone else think for me? Forgive me for not understanding how his idea is to work, though, in my own defence, you have not quite explain it with the necessary lucidity required for my, or indeed, anyone's understanding of it. Indeed, I suspect that there isn't much in it, otherwise you would not write as the modern French philosophers, choked it up in jargon from head to foot. But, the lack of clarity aside, I am indeed fearful of conspiracy, for when an entity is entrusted with redistributing the resources and energy fairly and appropriately, there is too much power vested upon this centralised authority, to the detriment of the powers of the individual- unless you want a collective mindset bowing to this single power, and put a child-like faith in its capacity for fair, sustainable, and equal distribution.

This fearfulness is perfectly founded from an intellectual perspective, the fear that if too much authority is vested in a single entity or group of entities, it can, and usually does, corrupt into authoritarianism- a quick browse through any respectable history would procure examples from businessmen to statesmen to lords and ladies, &c. I do not see how this is nihilistic- if we take nihilism to mean that there is no morals or purpose in the world. I don't quite think that anything I have written thus far can suggest this viewpoint. Let us pretend I have said that, how does that interfer with my argument that your equation seems to ignore the possibility of material want, and put every want into that narrow realm of belongingness? Am I to believe there is not desire beyond that? I am sure there are psychologist a-plenty who would agree with me on this issue.

But, then again, you are quite right in chatising me for being ignorant- and my ignorance may well make me, a single individual with little standing in the world, a unwitting servant of this cabal of evil, monacled men with twirling moustachios. The fact that they are evil or that I am a pawn does not play any part in the inherent weaknesses of your arguments. I therefore stand still unconvinced as I was before, but, if you are able to provide Jacques Fresco plan in detail and explaination as to why it would work, I am more than willing to hear it out.

"Explanation"? Or more like research? I do my own research and then make my decision based on the information I've collected, while this "letting someone else think for me" isn't much of an excuse. When both biomimicry and holistic socioeconomic aren't some radical ideas, because they are observable phenomenons within nature's practice of resource based economy.

Learning about the natural world is one thing, learning from the natural world -- that's the switch. That's the profound switch. What they realized was that the answers to their questions are everywhere; they just needed to change the lenses with which they saw the world. 3.8 billion years of field testing. 10 to 30 -- Craig Venter will probably tell you; I think there's a lot more than 30 million -- well-adapted solutions. The important thing for me is that these are solutions solved in context. And the context is the Earth -- the same context that we're trying to solve our problems in. So it's the conscious emulation of life's genius. It's not slavishly mimicking -- although Al is trying to get the hairdo going -- it's not a slavish mimicry. It's taking the design principles, the genius of the natural world, and learning something from it.

... What's the syllabus? Three questions, for me, are key. How does life make things? This is the opposite; this is how we make things. It's called heat, beat and treat -- that's what material scientists call it. And it's carving things down from the top, with 96 percent waste left over and only 4 percent product. You heat it up, you beat it with high pressures, you use chemicals. OK. Heat, beat and treat.

Life can't afford to do that. How does life make things? How does life make the most of things? That's a geranium pollen. And its shape is what gives it the function of being able to tumble through air so easily, OK. Look at that shape. Life adds information to matter. In other words: structure. It gives it information. By adding information to matter, it gives it a function that's different than without that structure. And thirdly, how does life make things disappear into systems? Because life doesn't really deal in things; there are no things in the natural world divorced from their systems. Really quick syllabus. As I'm reading more and more now, and following the story, there are some amazing things coming up in the biological sciences. And at the same time, I'm listening to a lot of businesses and finding what their sort of grand challenges are. The two groups are not talking to each other. At all.(citation)

That's biomimicry in a nutshell, and the key here is life doesn't deal in abstraction like a fiat currency. Instead life builds stuffs out of sheer environmental information and natural structures. That's one part of the resource based economics, and the holistic socioeconomic is the opposite of Tim Jackson's modern economic narrative: It's a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about.

But before we consign ourselves to despair, maybe we should just go back and say, "Did we get this right? Is this really how people are? Is this really how economies behave?" And almost straightaway we actually run up against a couple of anomalies. The first one is in the crisis itself. In the crisis, in the recession, what do people want to do? They want to hunker down. They want to look to the future. They want to spend less and save more. But saving is exactly the wrong thing to do from the system point of view. Keynes called this the "paradox of thrift" -- saving slows down recovery. And politicians call on us continually to draw down more debt, to draw down our own savings even farther, just so that we can get the show back on the road, so we can keep this growth-based economy going. It's an anomaly, it's a place where the system actually is at odds with who we are as people.

Here's another one -- completely different one: Why is it that we don't do the blindingly obvious things we should do to combat climate change, very, very simple things like buying energy-efficient appliances, putting in efficient lights, turning the lights off occasionally, insulating our homes? These things save carbon, they save energy, they save us money. So is it that, though they make perfect economic sense, we don't do them? Well, I had my own personal insight into this a few years ago. It was a Sunday evening, Sunday afternoon, and it was just after -- actually, to be honest, too long after -- we had moved into a new house. And I had finally got around to doing some draft stripping, installing insulation around the windows and doors to keep out the drafts. And my, then, five year-old daughter was helping me in the way that five year-olds do. And we'd been doing this for a while, when she turned to me very solemnly and said, "Will this really keep out the giraffes?" "Here they are, the giraffes." You can hear the five-year-old mind working. These ones, interestingly, are 400 miles north of here outside Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. Goodness knows what they make of the Lake District weather. But actually that childish misrepresentation stuck with me, because it suddenly became clear to me why we don't do the blindingly obvious things. We're too busy keeping out the giraffes -- putting the kids on the bus in the morning, getting ourselves to work on time, surviving email overload and shop floor politics, foraging for groceries, throwing together meals, escaping for a couple of precious hours in the evening into prime-time TV or TED online, getting from one end of the day to the other, keeping out the giraffes.

What is the objective? "What is the objective of the consumer?" Mary Douglas asked in an essay on poverty written 35 years ago. "It is," she said, "to help create the social world and find a credible place in it." That is a deeply humanizing vision of our lives, and it's a completely different vision than the one that lies at the heart of this economic model. So who are we? Who are these people? Are we these novelty-seeking, hedonistic, selfish individuals? Or might we actually occasi

"Explanation"? Or more like research? I do my own research and then make my decision based on the information I've collected, while this "letting someone else think for me" isn't much of an excuse. When both biomimicry and holistic socioeconomic aren't some radical ideas, because they are observable phenomenons within nature's practice of resource based economy.

Learning about the natural world is one thing, learning from the natural world -- that's the switch. That's the profound switch. What they realized was that the answers to their questions are everywhere; they just needed to change the lenses with which they saw the world. 3.8 billion years of field testing. 10 to 30 -- Craig Venter will probably tell you; I think there's a lot more than 30 million -- well-adapted solutions. The important thing for me is that these are solutions solved in context. And the context is the Earth -- the same context that we're trying to solve our problems in. So it's the conscious emulation of life's genius. It's not slavishly mimicking -- although Al is trying to get the hairdo going -- it's not a slavish mimicry. It's taking the design principles, the genius of the natural world, and learning something from it.

... What's the syllabus? Three questions, for me, are key. How does life make things? This is the opposite; this is how we make things. It's called heat, beat and treat -- that's what material scientists call it. And it's carving things down from the top, with 96 percent waste left over and only 4 percent product. You heat it up, you beat it with high pressures, you use chemicals. OK. Heat, beat and treat.

Life can't afford to do that. How does life make things? How does life make the most of things? That's a geranium pollen. And its shape is what gives it the function of being able to tumble through air so easily, OK. Look at that shape. Life adds information to matter. In other words: structure. It gives it information. By adding information to matter, it gives it a function that's different than without that structure. And thirdly, how does life make things disappear into systems? Because life doesn't really deal in things; there are no things in the natural world divorced from their systems. Really quick syllabus. As I'm reading more and more now, and following the story, there are some amazing things coming up in the biological sciences. And at the same time, I'm listening to a lot of businesses and finding what their sort of grand challenges are. The two groups are not talking to each other. At all.(citation)

That's biomimicry in a nutshell, and the key here is life doesn't deal in abstraction like a fiat currency. Instead life builds stuffs out of sheer environmental information and natural structures. That's one part of the resource based economics, and the holistic socioeconomic is the opposite of Tim Jackson's modern economic narrative: It's a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about.

But before we consign ourselves to despair, maybe we should just go back and say, "Did we get this right? Is this really how people are? Is this really how economies behave?" And almost straightaway we actually run up against a couple of anomalies. The first one is in the crisis itself. In the crisis, in the recession, what do people want to do? They want to hunker down. They want to look to the future. They want to spend less and save more. But saving is exactly the wrong thing to do from the system point of view. Keynes called this the "paradox of thrift" -- saving slows down recovery. And politicians call on us continually to draw down more debt, to draw down our own savings even farther, just so that we can get the show back on the road, so we can keep this growth-based economy going. It's an anomaly, it's a place where the system actually is at odds with who we are as people.

Here's another one -- completely different one: Why is it that we don't do the blindingly obvious things we should do to combat climate change, very, very simple things like buying energy-efficient appliances, putting in efficient lights, turning the lights off occasionally, insulating our homes? These things save carbon, they save energy, they save us money. So is it that, though they make perfect economic sense, we don't do them? Well, I had my own personal insight into this a few years ago. It was a Sunday evening, Sunday afternoon, and it was just after -- actually, to be honest, too long after -- we had moved into a new house. And I had finally got around to doing some draft stripping, installing insulation around the windows and doors to keep out the drafts. And my, then, five year-old daughter was helping me in the way that five year-olds do. And we'd been doing this for a while, when she turned to me very solemnly and said, "Will this really keep out the giraffes?" "Here they are, the giraffes." You can hear the five-year-old mind working. These ones, interestingly, are 400 miles north of here outside Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. Goodness knows what they make of the Lake District weather. But actually that childish misrepresentation stuck with me, because it suddenly became clear to me why we don't do the blindingly obvious things. We're too busy keeping out the giraffes -- putting the kids on the bus in the morning, getting ourselves to work on time, surviving email overload and shop floor politics, foraging for groceries, throwing together meals, escaping for a couple of precious hours in the evening into prime-time TV or TED online, getting from one end of the day to the other, keeping out the giraffes.

What is the objective? "What is the objective of the consumer?" Mary Douglas asked in an essay on poverty written 35 years ago. "It is," she said, "to help create the social world and find a credible place in it." That is a deeply humanizing vision of our lives, and it's a completely different vision than the one that lies at the heart of this economic model. So who are we? Who are these people? Are we these novelty-seeking, hedonistic, selfish individuals? Or might we actually occasi

I am afraid that I am even less convinced than before- the whole thing just strikes me as completely absurd. First, Biological Mimicry is, as I understand it, applying the processes of nature to our own lives, which runs into these two problems: first, Nature is imperfect, she runs, she creates, and she also devestate herself, her processes involves many things inapplicable to the human economy or human life in general, and, while we should study her, preserve her, and all that, there is absolutely no reason why we should live completely by her governance. We can't, for example apply Darwin's Theory of Evolution upon society- unless, of course, you are among those rare breed of Eugenicists. Second, we have an imperfect understanding of how she works, and any application of what is good in nature without a full understanding is like applying a superficial aspect of a happy, well-mannered, and genteel family to your own family- say the children's obedience to their parents- without fully understanding the cause of this goodness- to continue with the metaphor, what the authorities, in the form of the parents, do to merit this filiality, why the children should, for an instance, bend their own will to comply with the authority's request, so on and so forth, what incentives motivate them- pure tomfoolery.

Secondly, you seem to ignore material wants that does not fall between needs and image- to give an example, say I wanted to purchase something that is rather embarrassing and not only does not contribute to image and a sense of position in society, but can be detrimental to it, say pornography. I purchase this book with the utmost secrecy and stash it away where no one but myself have access to it, not because I need it, or I want it to belong to a social group, but because I desire it for its own sake. While there are some gross example of wants that are actively generated by marketing and advertisement, such as the Apple i-whatever-the-hell-they-are-wrapping-up-in-white-plastic-and-selling-for-half-your-annual-income and the Apple Community, some things are motivated by the desire of that object for itself. The economy runs on purchase, regardless of what type of wants goes into purchasing an item. You system of economics cannot surmount this, even if people do create schools to brain-wash...wait...educate children, and turn them to proper, altruistic gentlemen.

"Explanation"? Or more like research? I do my own research and then make my decision based on the information I've collected, while this "letting someone else think for me" isn't much of an excuse. When both biomimicry and holistic socioeconomic aren't some radical ideas, because they are observable phenomenons within nature's practice of resource based economy.

Learning about the natural world is one thing, learning from the natural world -- that's the switch. That's the profound switch. What they realized was that the answers to their questions are everywhere; they just needed to change the lenses with which they saw the world. 3.8 billion years of field testing. 10 to 30 -- Craig Venter will probably tell you; I think there's a lot more than 30 million -- well-adapted solutions. The important thing for me is that these are solutions solved in context. And the context is the Earth -- the same context that we're trying to solve our problems in. So it's the conscious emulation of life's genius. It's not slavishly mimicking -- although Al is trying to get the hairdo going -- it's not a slavish mimicry. It's taking the design principles, the genius of the natural world, and learning something from it.

... What's the syllabus? Three questions, for me, are key. How does life make things? This is the opposite; this is how we make things. It's called heat, beat and treat -- that's what material scientists call it. And it's carving things down from the top, with 96 percent waste left over and only 4 percent product. You heat it up, you beat it with high pressures, you use chemicals. OK. Heat, beat and treat.

Life can't afford to do that. How does life make things? How does life make the most of things? That's a geranium pollen. And its shape is what gives it the function of being able to tumble through air so easily, OK. Look at that shape. Life adds information to matter. In other words: structure. It gives it information. By adding information to matter, it gives it a function that's different than without that structure. And thirdly, how does life make things disappear into systems? Because life doesn't really deal in things; there are no things in the natural world divorced from their systems. Really quick syllabus. As I'm reading more and more now, and following the story, there are some amazing things coming up in the biological sciences. And at the same time, I'm listening to a lot of businesses and finding what their sort of grand challenges are. The two groups are not talking to each other. At all.(citation)

That's biomimicry in a nutshell, and the key here is life doesn't deal in abstraction like a fiat currency. Instead life builds stuffs out of sheer environmental information and natural structures. That's one part of the resource based economics, and the holistic socioeconomic is the opposite of Tim Jackson's modern economic narrative: It's a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about.

But before we consign ourselves to despair, maybe we should just go back and say, "Did we get this right? Is this really how people are? Is this really how economies behave?" And almost straightaway we actually run up against a couple of anomalies. The first one is in the crisis itself. In the crisis, in the recession, what do people want to do? They want to hunker down. They want to look to the future. They want to spend less and save more. But saving is exactly the wrong thing to do from the system point of view. Keynes called this the "paradox of thrift" -- saving slows down recovery. And politicians call on us continually to draw down more debt, to draw down our own savings even farther, just so that we can get the show back on the road, so we can keep this growth-based economy going. It's an anomaly, it's a place where the system actually is at odds with who we are as people.

Here's another one -- completely different one: Why is it that we don't do the blindingly obvious things we should do to combat climate change, very, very simple things like buying energy-efficient appliances, putting in efficient lights, turning the lights off occasionally, insulating our homes? These things save carbon, they save energy, they save us money. So is it that, though they make perfect economic sense, we don't do them? Well, I had my own personal insight into this a few years ago. It was a Sunday evening, Sunday afternoon, and it was just after -- actually, to be honest, too long after -- we had moved into a new house. And I had finally got around to doing some draft stripping, installing insulation around the windows and doors to keep out the drafts. And my, then, five year-old daughter was helping me in the way that five year-olds do. And we'd been doing this for a while, when she turned to me very solemnly and said, "Will this really keep out the giraffes?" "Here they are, the giraffes." You can hear the five-year-old mind working. These ones, interestingly, are 400 miles north of here outside Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. Goodness knows what they make of the Lake District weather. But actually that childish misrepresentation stuck with me, because it suddenly became clear to me why we don't do the blindingly obvious things. We're too busy keeping out the giraffes -- putting the kids on the bus in the morning, getting ourselves to work on time, surviving email overload and shop floor politics, foraging for groceries, throwing together meals, escaping for a couple of precious hours in the evening into prime-time TV or TED online, getting from one end of the day to the other, keeping out the giraffes.

What is the objective? "What is the objective of the consumer?" Mary Douglas asked in an essay on poverty written 35 years ago. "It is," she said, "to help create the social world and find a credible place in it." That is a deeply humanizing vision of our lives, and it's a completely different vision than the one that lies at the heart of this economic model. So who are we? Who are these people? Are we these novelty-seeking, hedonistic, selfish individuals? Or might we actually occasi

I am afraid that I am even less convinced than before- the whole thing just strikes me as completely absurd. First, Biological Mimicry is, as I understand it, applying the processes of nature to our own lives, which runs into these two problems: first, Nature is imperfect, she runs, she creates, and she also devestate herself, her processes involves many things inapplicable to the human economy or human life in general, and, while we should study her, preserve her, and all that, there is absolutely no reason why we should live completely by her governance. We can't, for example apply Darwin's Theory of Evolution upon society- unless, of course, you are among those rare breed of Eugenicists. Second, we have an imperfect understanding of how she works, and any application of what is good in nature without a full understanding is like applying a superficial aspect of a happy, well-mannered, and genteel family to your own family- say the children's obedience to their parents- without fully understanding the cause of this goodness- to continue with the metaphor, what the authorities, in the form of the parents, do to merit this filiality, why the children should, for an instance, bend their own will to comply with the authority's request, so on and so forth, what incentives motivate them- pure tomfoolery.

Secondly, you seem to ignore material wants that does not fall between needs and image- to give an example, say I wanted to purchase something that is rather embarrassing and not only does not contribute to image and a sense of position in society, but can be detrimental to it, say pornography. I purchase this book with the utmost secrecy and stash it away where no one but myself have access to it, not because I need it, or I want it to belong to a social group, but because I desire it for its own sake. While there are some gross example of wants that are actively generated by marketing and advertisement, such as the Apple i-whatever-the-hell-they-are-wrapping-up-in-white-plastic-and-selling-for-half-your-annual-income and the Apple Community, some things are motivated by the desire of that object for itself. The economy runs on purchase, regardless of what type of wants goes into purchasing an item. You system of economics cannot surmount this, even if people do create schools to brain-wash...wait...educate children, and turn them to proper, altruistic gentlemen.

"Survival of the fittest" wasn't even Darwin's own word, nor is evolution the totality of nature or biology. Furthermore, "fittest" implies the species' capacity to change, in order to adapt its environment. Therefore nature is "imperfect" because environment is constantly changing, whereas a state of perfection is no change. So don't go about misinterpreting nature through superiority/god complex, when that's just sheer ignorance caused by unjustified arrogance.

Now, if you don't trust someone, you place restrictions on them, right. If I doubt my older sister's ability to pay back the 10 percent interest I established on her last loan, I'm going to withhold her ability to get more money from me until she pays it back. True story, by the way. Now, adults seem to have a prevalently restrictive attitude towards kids from every "don't do that," "don't do this" in the school handbook, to restrictions on school internet use. As history points out, regimes become oppressive when they're fearful about keeping control. And, although adults may not be quite at the level of totalitarian regimes, kids have no, or very little, say in making the rules, when really the attitude should be reciprocal, meaning that the adult population should learn and take into account the wishes of the younger population.

Now, what's even worse than restriction is that adults often underestimate kids abilities. We love challenges, but when expectations are low, trust me, we will sink to them. My own parents had anything but low expectations for me and my sister. Okay, so they didn't tell us to become doctors or lawyers or anything like that, but my dad did read to us about Aristotle and pioneer germ fighters when lots of other kids were hearing "The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round." Well, we heard that one too, but "Pioneer Germ Fighters" totally rules.(citation)

Your second point is even more extreme and biased, when in a sexually liberated society, human sexuality is just a part of nature, not a commodity. Furthermore, your sexual preference was not your choice, but rather it's a part of your biological drive. Your culture predetermined your custom of sexual regulation, because your society demands your energy towards solely on production and consumption. AKA sex sells.

Now, to say this, is not to say that we have got the perfect solution in our own society. For instance, this is what it's like to go to a news stand almost anywhere in the civilized world. Now, granted, for many men, it may require a degree in philosophy to see something wrong with these images. But if we are in a reflective mood we can ask, "Is this the perfect expression of psychological balance with respect to variables like youth and beauty and women's bodies?" I mean, is this the optimal environment in which to raise our children? Probably not. Okay, so perhaps there is some place on the spectrum between these two extremes that represents a place of better balance. Perhaps there are many such places --

again, given other changes in human culture there may be many peaks on the moral landscape. But the thing to notice is that there will be many more ways not to be on a peak. Now, the irony, from my perspective is that the only people who seem to generally agree with me and who think that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions are religious demagogues of one form or another.(citation)

So your societal custom of buying pornography in secrecy, was just self-evidence of your natural fitness within a materialistic culture that perceives women as nothing more than mere sexual objects of desire. AKA the man box.

I grew up in New York City, between Harlem and the Bronx. Growing up as a boy, we were taught that men had to be tough, had to be strong, had to be courageous, dominating -- no pain, no emotions, with the exception of anger -- and definitely no fear -- that men are in charge, which means women are not; that men lead, and you should just follow and do what we say; that men are superior, women are inferior; that men are strong, women are weak; that women are of less value -- property of men -- and objects, particularly sexual objects. I've later come to know that to be the collective socialization of men, better known as the "man box." See this man box has in it all the ingredients of how we define what it means to be a man. Now I also want to say, without a doubt, there are some wonderful, wonderful, absolutely wonderful things about being a man. But at the same time, there's some stuff that's just straight up twisted. And we really need to begin to challenge, look at it and really get in the process of deconstructing, redefining, what we come to know as manhood.

... I come to also look at this as this fear that we have as men, this fear that just has us paralyzed, holding us hostage to this man box. I can remember speaking to a 12 year-old boy, a football player, and I asked him, I said, "How would you feel if, in front of all the players, your coach told you you were playing like a girl?" Now I expected him to say something like, I'd be sad, I'd be mad, I'd be angry, or something like that. No, the boy said to me -- the boy said to me, "It would destroy me." And I said to myself, "God, if it would destroy him to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?"

It took me back to a time when I was about 12 years old. I grew up in tenement buildings in the inner-city. At this time we're living in the Bronx. And in the building next to where I lived there was a guy named Johnny. He was about 16 years old, and we were all about 12 years old -- younger guys. And he was hanging out with all us younger guys. And this guy, he was up to a lot of no good. He was the kind of kid who parents would have to wonder, "What is this 16 year-old boy doing with these 12 year-old boys?" And he did spend a lot of time up to no good. He was a troubled kid. His mother had died from a heroin overdose. He was being raised by his grandmother. His father wasn't on the set. His grandmother had two jobs. He was home alone a lot. But I've got to tell you, we young guys, we looked up to this dude. He was cool. He was fine. That's what the sisters said, "He was fine." He was having sex. We all looked up to him.

So one day, I'm out in front of the house doing something -- just playing around, doing something -- I don't know what. He looks out his window, he calls me upstairs, he said, "Hey Anthony." They called my Anthony growing up as a kid. "Hey Anthony, come on upstairs." Johnny call, you go. So I run right upstairs. As he opens the door, he says to me, "Do you want some?" Now I immediately knew what he meant. Because for me growing up at that time, and our relationship with this man box, do you want some meant one of two things, sex or drugs -- and we weren't doing drugs. Now my box, card, man box card, was immediately in jeopardy. Two things: One, I never had sex. We don't talk about that as men. You only tell your dearest, closest friend, sworn to secrecy for life, the first time you had sex. For everybody else, we go around like we've been having sex since we were two. There ain't no first time. The other thing I couldn't tell him is that I didn't want any. That's even worse. We're supposed to always be on the prowl. Women are objects, especially sexual objects.

Anyway, so I couldn't tell him any of that. So, like my mother would say, make a long story short. I just simply said to Johnny, "Yes." He told me to go in his room. I go in his room. On his bed is a girl from the neighborhood named Sheila. She's 16 years old. She's nude. She's what I know today to be mentally ill, higher functioning at times than others. We had a whole choice's-worth of inappropriate names for her. Anyway, Johnny had just gotten through having sex with her. Well actually, he raped her, but he would say he had sex with her. Because, while Sheila never said no, she also never said yes.

So he was offering me the opportunity to do the same. So when I go in the room, I close the door. Folks, I'm petrified. I stand with my back to the door so Johnny can't bust in the room and see that I'm not doing anything. And I stand there long enough that I could have actually done something. So now I'm no longer trying to figure out what I'm going to do, I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get out of this room. So in my 12 years of wisdom, I zip my pants down, I walk out into the room. And lo and behold to me, while I was in the room with Sheila, Johnny was back at the window calling guys up. So now there's a living room full of guys. It was like the waiting room in the doctor's office. And they asked me how was it. And I say to them, "It was good." And I zip my pants up in front of them, and I head for the door.

Now I say this all with remorse, and I was feeling a tremendous amount of remorse at that time, but I was conflicted, because, while I was feeling remorse, I was excited, because I didn't get caught, but I knew I felt bad about what was happening. This fear getting outside the man box totally enveloped me. It was way more important to me, about me and my man box card than about Sheila and what was happening to her.

See collectively, we as men are taught to have less value in women, to view them as property and the objects of men. We see that as an equation that equals violence against women. We as men, good men, the large majority of men, we operate on the foundation of this whole collective socialization. We kind of see ourselves separate, but we're very much a part of it. You see, we have to come to understand that less value, property and objectification is the foundation and the violence can't happen without it. So we're very much a part of the solution as well as the problem. The center for disease control says that men's violence against women is at epidemic proportions, is the number one health concern for women in this country and abroad.

So quickly, I'd like to just say, this is the love of my life, my daughter Jay. The world I envision for her, how do I want men to be acting and behaving? I need you on board. I need you with me. I need you working with me and me working with you on how we raise our sons and teach them to be men -- that it's okay to not be dominating, that it's okay to have feelings and emotions, that it's okay to promote equality, that it's okay to have women who are just friends and that's it, that it's okay to be whole, that my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman.

I remember asking a nine year-old boy. I asked a nine year-old boy, "What would life be like for you, if you didn't have to adhere to this man box?" He said to me, "I would be free."(citation)

So do you still insist on following an arbitrary human laws of inequality caused by biases and superstitions for perfection, which can only lead to further racism, sexism, colonialism, and fascism. Or the alternative.

"Explanation"? Or more like research? I do my own research and then make my decision based on the information I've collected, while this "letting someone else think for me" isn't much of an excuse. When both biomimicry and holistic socioeconomic aren't some radical ideas, because they are observable phenomenons within nature's practice of resource based economy.

Learning about the natural world is one thing, learning from the natural world -- that's the switch. That's the profound switch. What they realized was that the answers to their questions are everywhere; they just needed to change the lenses with which they saw the world. 3.8 billion years of field testing. 10 to 30 -- Craig Venter will probably tell you; I think there's a lot more than 30 million -- well-adapted solutions. The important thing for me is that these are solutions solved in context. And the context is the Earth -- the same context that we're trying to solve our problems in. So it's the conscious emulation of life's genius. It's not slavishly mimicking -- although Al is trying to get the hairdo going -- it's not a slavish mimicry. It's taking the design principles, the genius of the natural world, and learning something from it.

... What's the syllabus? Three questions, for me, are key. How does life make things? This is the opposite; this is how we make things. It's called heat, beat and treat -- that's what material scientists call it. And it's carving things down from the top, with 96 percent waste left over and only 4 percent product. You heat it up, you beat it with high pressures, you use chemicals. OK. Heat, beat and treat.

Life can't afford to do that. How does life make things? How does life make the most of things? That's a geranium pollen. And its shape is what gives it the function of being able to tumble through air so easily, OK. Look at that shape. Life adds information to matter. In other words: structure. It gives it information. By adding information to matter, it gives it a function that's different than without that structure. And thirdly, how does life make things disappear into systems? Because life doesn't really deal in things; there are no things in the natural world divorced from their systems. Really quick syllabus. As I'm reading more and more now, and following the story, there are some amazing things coming up in the biological sciences. And at the same time, I'm listening to a lot of businesses and finding what their sort of grand challenges are. The two groups are not talking to each other. At all.(citation)

That's biomimicry in a nutshell, and the key here is life doesn't deal in abstraction like a fiat currency. Instead life builds stuffs out of sheer environmental information and natural structures. That's one part of the resource based economics, and the holistic socioeconomic is the opposite of Tim Jackson's modern economic narrative: It's a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about.

But before we consign ourselves to despair, maybe we should just go back and say, "Did we get this right? Is this really how people are? Is this really how economies behave?" And almost straightaway we actually run up against a couple of anomalies. The first one is in the crisis itself. In the crisis, in the recession, what do people want to do? They want to hunker down. They want to look to the future. They want to spend less and save more. But saving is exactly the wrong thing to do from the system point of view. Keynes called this the "paradox of thrift" -- saving slows down recovery. And politicians call on us continually to draw down more debt, to draw down our own savings even farther, just so that we can get the show back on the road, so we can keep this growth-based economy going. It's an anomaly, it's a place where the system actually is at odds with who we are as people.

Here's another one -- completely different one: Why is it that we don't do the blindingly obvious things we should do to combat climate change, very, very simple things like buying energy-efficient appliances, putting in efficient lights, turning the lights off occasionally, insulating our homes? These things save carbon, they save energy, they save us money. So is it that, though they make perfect economic sense, we don't do them? Well, I had my own personal insight into this a few years ago. It was a Sunday evening, Sunday afternoon, and it was just after -- actually, to be honest, too long after -- we had moved into a new house. And I had finally got around to doing some draft stripping, installing insulation around the windows and doors to keep out the drafts. And my, then, five year-old daughter was helping me in the way that five year-olds do. And we'd been doing this for a while, when she turned to me very solemnly and said, "Will this really keep out the giraffes?" "Here they are, the giraffes." You can hear the five-year-old mind working. These ones, interestingly, are 400 miles north of here outside Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. Goodness knows what they make of the Lake District weather. But actually that childish misrepresentation stuck with me, because it suddenly became clear to me why we don't do the blindingly obvious things. We're too busy keeping out the giraffes -- putting the kids on the bus in the morning, getting ourselves to work on time, surviving email overload and shop floor politics, foraging for groceries, throwing together meals, escaping for a couple of precious hours in the evening into prime-time TV or TED online, getting from one end of the day to the other, keeping out the giraffes.

What is the objective? "What is the objective of the consumer?" Mary Douglas asked in an essay on poverty written 35 years ago. "It is," she said, "to help create the social world and find a credible place in it." That is a deeply humanizing vision of our lives, and it's a completely different vision than the one that lies at the heart of this economic model. So who are we? Who are these people? Are we these novelty-seeking, hedonistic, selfish individuals? Or might we actually occasi

I am afraid that I am even less convinced than before- the whole thing just strikes me as completely absurd. First, Biological Mimicry is, as I understand it, applying the processes of nature to our own lives, which runs into these two problems: first, Nature is imperfect, she runs, she creates, and she also devestate herself, her processes involves many things inapplicable to the human economy or human life in general, and, while we should study her, preserve her, and all that, there is absolutely no reason why we should live completely by her governance. We can't, for example apply Darwin's Theory of Evolution upon society- unless, of course, you are among those rare breed of Eugenicists. Second, we have an imperfect understanding of how she works, and any application of what is good in nature without a full understanding is like applying a superficial aspect of a happy, well-mannered, and genteel family to your own family- say the children's obedience to their parents- without fully understanding the cause of this goodness- to continue with the metaphor, what the authorities, in the form of the parents, do to merit this filiality, why the children should, for an instance, bend their own will to comply with the authority's request, so on and so forth, what incentives motivate them- pure tomfoolery.

Secondly, you seem to ignore material wants that does not fall between needs and image- to give an example, say I wanted to purchase something that is rather embarrassing and not only does not contribute to image and a sense of position in society, but can be detrimental to it, say pornography. I purchase this book with the utmost secrecy and stash it away where no one but myself have access to it, not because I need it, or I want it to belong to a social group, but because I desire it for its own sake. While there are some gross example of wants that are actively generated by marketing and advertisement, such as the Apple i-whatever-the-hell-they-are-wrapping-up-in-white-plastic-and-selling-for-half-your-annual-income and the Apple Community, some things are motivated by the desire of that object for itself. The economy runs on purchase, regardless of what type of wants goes into purchasing an item. You system of economics cannot surmount this, even if people do create schools to brain-wash...wait...educate children, and turn them to proper, altruistic gentlemen.

"Survival of the fittest" wasn't even Darwin's own word, nor is evolution the totality of nature or biology. Furthermore, "fittest" imply the species' capacity to change, in order to adapt its environment. Therefore nature is "imperfect" because environment is constantly changing, whereas a state of perfection is no change. So don't go about misinterpreting nature through superiority/god complex, when that's just sheer ignorance caused by unjustified arrogance.

Now, if you don't trust someone, you place restrictions on them, right. If I doubt my older sister's ability to pay back the 10 percent interest I established on her last loan, I'm going to withhold her ability to get more money from me until she pays it back. True story, by the way. Now, adults seem to have a prevalently restrictive attitude towards kids from every "don't do that," "don't do this" in the school handbook, to restrictions on school internet use. As history points out, regimes become oppressive when they're fearful about keeping control. And, although adults may not be quite at the level of totalitarian regimes, kids have no, or very little, say in making the rules, when really the attitude should be reciprocal, meaning that the adult population should learn and take into account the wishes of the younger population.

Now, what's even worse than restriction is that adults often underestimate kids abilities. We love challenges, but when expectations are low, trust me, we will sink to them. My own parents had anything but low expectations for me and my sister. Okay, so they didn't tell us to become doctors or lawyers or anything like that, but my dad did read to us about Aristotle and pioneer germ fighters when lots of other kids were hearing "The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round." Well, we heard that one too, but "Pioneer Germ Fighters" totally rules.(citation)

Your second point is even more extreme and biased, when in a sexually liberated society, human sexuality is just a part of nature, not a commodity. Furthermore, your sexual preference was not your choice, but rather it's a part of your biological drive. Your culture predetermined your custom of sexual regulation, because your society demands your energy towards solely on production and consumption. AKA sex sells.

Now, to say this, is not to say that we have got the perfect solution in our own society. For instance, this is what it's like to go to a news stand almost anywhere in the civilized world. Now, granted, for many men, it may require a degree in philosophy to see something wrong with these images. But if we are in a reflective mood we can ask, "Is this the perfect expression of psychological balance with respect to variables like youth and beauty and women's bodies?" I mean, is this the optimal environment in which to raise our children? Probably not. Okay, so perhaps there is some place on the spectrum between these two extremes that represents a place of better balance. Perhaps there are many such places --

again, given other changes in human culture there may be many peaks on the moral landscape. But the thing to notice is that there will be many more ways not to be on a peak. Now, the irony, from my perspective is that the only people who seem to generally agree with me and who think that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions are religious demagogues of one form or another.(citation)

So your societal custom of buying pornography in secrecy, was just self-evidence of your natural fitness within a materialistic culture that perceives women as nothing more than mere sexual objects of desire. AKA the man box.

I grew up in New York City, between Harlem and the Bronx. Growing up as a boy, we were taught that men had to be tough, had to be strong, had to be courageous, dominating -- no pain, no emotions, with the exception of anger -- and definitely no fear -- that men are in charge, which means women are not; that men lead, and you should just follow and do what we say; that men are superior, women are inferior; that men are strong, women are weak; that women are of less value -- property of men -- and objects, particularly sexual objects. I've later come to know that to be the collective socialization of men, better known as the "man box." See this man box has in it all the ingredients of how we define what it means to be a man. Now I also want to say, without a doubt, there are some wonderful, wonderful, absolutely wonderful things about being a man. But at the same time, there's some stuff that's just straight up twisted. And we really need to begin to challenge, look at it and really get in the process of deconstructing, redefining, what we come to know as manhood.

... I come to also look at this as this fear that we have as men, this fear that just has us paralyzed, holding us hostage to this man box. I can remember speaking to a 12 year-old boy, a football player, and I asked him, I said, "How would you feel if, in front of all the players, your coach told you you were playing like a girl?" Now I expected him to say something like, I'd be sad, I'd be mad, I'd be angry, or something like that. No, the boy said to me -- the boy said to me, "It would destroy me." And I said to myself, "God, if it would destroy him to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?"

It took me back to a time when I was about 12 years old. I grew up in tenement buildings in the inner-city. At this time we're living in the Bronx. And in the building next to where I lived there was a guy named Johnny. He was about 16 years old, and we were all about 12 years old -- younger guys. And he was hanging out with all us younger guys. And this guy, he was up to a lot of no good. He was the kind of kid who parents would have to wonder, "What is this 16 year-old boy doing with these 12 year-old boys?" And he did spend a lot of time up to no good. He was a troubled kid. His mother had died from a heroin overdose. He was being raised by his grandmother. His father wasn't on the set. His grandmother had two jobs. He was home alone a lot. But I've got to tell you, we young guys, we looked up to this dude. He was cool. He was fine. That's what the sisters said, "He was fine." He was having sex. We all looked up to him.

So one day, I'm out in front of the house doing something -- just playing around, doing something -- I don't know what. He looks out his window, he calls me upstairs, he said, "Hey Anthony." They called my Anthony growing up as a kid. "Hey Anthony, come on upstairs." Johnny call, you go. So I run right upstairs. As he opens the door, he says to me, "Do you want some?" Now I immediately knew what he meant. Because for me growing up at that time, and our relationship with this man box, do you want some meant one of two things, sex or drugs -- and we weren't doing drugs. Now my box, card, man box card, was immediately in jeopardy. Two things: One, I never had sex. We don't talk about that as men. You only tell your dearest, closest friend, sworn to secrecy for life, the first time you had sex. For everybody else, we go around like we've been having sex since we were two. There ain't no first time. The other thing I couldn't tell him is that I didn't want any. That's even worse. We're supposed to always be on the prowl. Women are objects, especially sexual objects.

Anyway, so I couldn't tell him any of that. So, like my mother would say, make a long story short. I just simply said to Johnny, "Yes." He told me to go in his room. I go in his room. On his bed is a girl from the neighborhood named Sheila. She's 16 years old. She's nude. She's what I know today to be mentally ill, higher functioning at times than others. We had a whole choice's-worth of inappropriate names for her. Anyway, Johnny had just gotten through having sex with her. Well actually, he raped her, but he would say he had sex with her. Because, while Sheila never said no, she also never said yes.

So he was offering me the opportunity to do the same. So when I go in the room, I close the door. Folks, I'm petrified. I stand with my back to the door so Johnny can't bust in the room and see that I'm not doing anything. And I stand there long enough that I could have actually done something. So now I'm no longer trying to figure out what I'm going to do, I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get out of this room. So in my 12 years of wisdom, I zip my pants down, I walk out into the room. And lo and behold to me, while I was in the room with Sheila, Johnny was back at the window calling guys up. So now there's a living room full of guys. It was like the waiting room in the doctor's office. And they asked me how was it. And I say to them, "It was good." And I zip my pants up in front of them, and I head for the door.

Now I say this all with remorse, and I was feeling a tremendous amount of remorse at that time, but I was conflicted, because, while I was feeling remorse, I was excited, because I didn't get caught, but I knew I felt bad about what was happening. This fear getting outside the man box totally enveloped me. It was way more important to me, about me and my man box card than about Sheila and what was happening to her.

See collectively, we as men are taught to have less value in women, to view them as property and the objects of men. We see that as an equation that equals violence against women. We as men, good men, the large majority of men, we operate on the foundation of this whole collective socialization. We kind of see ourselves separate, but we're very much a part of it. You see, we have to come to understand that less value, property and objectification is the foundation and the violence can't happen without it. So we're very much a part of the solution as well as the problem. The center for disease control says that men's violence against women is at epidemic proportions, is the number one health concern for women in this country and abroad.

So quickly, I'd like to just say, this is the love of my life, my daughter Jay. The world I envision for her, how do I want men to be acting and behaving? I need you on board. I need you with me. I need you working with me and me working with you on how we raise our sons and teach them to be men -- that it's okay to not be dominating, that it's okay to have feelings and emotions, that it's okay to promote equality, that it's okay to have women who are just friends and that's it, that it's okay to be whole, that my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman.

I remember asking a nine year-old boy. I asked a nine year-old boy, "What would life be like for you, if you didn't have to adhere to this man box?" He said to me, "I would be free."(citation)

I would say it is more arrogant to assume we know all about nature, when Science is but an imperfect emperical observation of nature and her many fold law, and know it so thoroughly as to apply it to ourselves- it assumes that we both are at the pinnicle of science, complete with perfect understanding, and thus able to apply its principles to our benefit, and, secondly, as a corollary to the first, arrogantly assume there is no more to be got out of science. There is nothing we can say with certainty, even with our sciences, only what is, through the powers of our current civilisation, only what is most accurate. It is less arrogant, or God-like, to say that nature is, herself, not perfect, because nature doesn't have a concept of what works and what doesn't, doesn't deliberate, does not choose to create anything, doesn't have any sense of perfection or imperfection, but is completely insentient, and only exist. As such, she can rends herself work woe upon her creatures by exactly the same processes that she creates, benefits, and do good onto the same. She isn't and shouldn't be a model for humanity, and it is insolent and stupid to assume that what we do not truly understand, and what doesn't exist for the benefit of anybody, can be used and imitated for our own purposes- the metaphor still holds.

Then, there is also another arrogance in saying you know what motivates all when you base that upon the experiences of a limited group of people. Your person, for example, who refuse the loan to her kin, bases her assesment of parental attitude as wrong because she was raised differently, and so, expects all to be raised like her and turn out to be like her. Humans, she must think, are monolithic, and can be raised in only one way and one way only, the way she was raised and the way she recommends. Children are all individual, and should be raised according to what they require as an individual- this, of course, begs the question, who should decide how children are raised? I certainly have no answer to that, but I am not presumptuous enough to say there is a universal method of raising children, or that there is a great deal of benefit in brainwashing them as you suggests with your model schools.

Afterwards, you try to pin down my desire of pornographic materials to mere biological determinism, built upon and driven forward by my society's stress on purchase and production, on pelf and pace, and all that. Now, let us pretend that it isn't porn I'm after, but books, and that these books are for my own private consumption, and not to create an air of an intellectual, but because I desire that book for its own sake, there being biologically and socially determination to like that particular book. That would still throw your theory off kilter- because I don't need the book, and the wanting of the book is not created by a cabal of marketers and advertisers, but because I want the book for its own sake, like I want the pornographic magazine for its own sake. I am not biologically inclined towards buying books or pornography- though my nature does determine my taste in pornography- and there is no sinister cabal of monacled men determining my taste- though the argument can be made for pornography, it does not explain away taste in literature.

Finally, you try to shoe me into your neat little theory of the 'man-box', what we normally call 'chauvinism', or, if you want to add a little Iberian flavour to it, 'machismo', and assumes two things, unrelated to Lord Jacques Fresco and his mighty magical system. First, that I am a heterosexual- which you do not know, nor will I tell you- and, next, that I view woman as something with which to quell my lust and nothing more, degrading woman to tools. And all this comes with being raised a man, as fashioned by Society's hand, consciously and unconsciously adapting what society describes as manly. Does society create an image of what is manly? Of course, you need not look too deep into that rubbish heap we call 'television programmes' to see it. Does it create expection that men feel required to meet, such as being well endowed with large genitals, foolhardy and thoughtless bravado, needless courage, emphasis of physical strenght over the intellect, what to wear, how to behave, all that? I would say it does as well. Am I part of this, I wouldn't know. All I know is, if I purchase pornography, it is not from my desire of belongingness or my need, but because I want, even if this want is created by society and biology.

"Explanation"? Or more like research? I do my own research and then make my decision based on the information I've collected, while this "letting someone else think for me" isn't much of an excuse. When both biomimicry and holistic socioeconomic aren't some radical ideas, because they are observable phenomenons within nature's practice of resource based economy.

Learning about the natural world is one thing, learning from the natural world -- that's the switch. That's the profound switch. What they realized was that the answers to their questions are everywhere; they just needed to change the lenses with which they saw the world. 3.8 billion years of field testing. 10 to 30 -- Craig Venter will probably tell you; I think there's a lot more than 30 million -- well-adapted solutions. The important thing for me is that these are solutions solved in context. And the context is the Earth -- the same context that we're trying to solve our problems in. So it's the conscious emulation of life's genius. It's not slavishly mimicking -- although Al is trying to get the hairdo going -- it's not a slavish mimicry. It's taking the design principles, the genius of the natural world, and learning something from it.

... What's the syllabus? Three questions, for me, are key. How does life make things? This is the opposite; this is how we make things. It's called heat, beat and treat -- that's what material scientists call it. And it's carving things down from the top, with 96 percent waste left over and only 4 percent product. You heat it up, you beat it with high pressures, you use chemicals. OK. Heat, beat and treat.

Life can't afford to do that. How does life make things? How does life make the most of things? That's a geranium pollen. And its shape is what gives it the function of being able to tumble through air so easily, OK. Look at that shape. Life adds information to matter. In other words: structure. It gives it information. By adding information to matter, it gives it a function that's different than without that structure. And thirdly, how does life make things disappear into systems? Because life doesn't really deal in things; there are no things in the natural world divorced from their systems. Really quick syllabus. As I'm reading more and more now, and following the story, there are some amazing things coming up in the biological sciences. And at the same time, I'm listening to a lot of businesses and finding what their sort of grand challenges are. The two groups are not talking to each other. At all.(citation)

That's biomimicry in a nutshell, and the key here is life doesn't deal in abstraction like a fiat currency. Instead life builds stuffs out of sheer environmental information and natural structures. That's one part of the resource based economics, and the holistic socioeconomic is the opposite of Tim Jackson's modern economic narrative: It's a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about.

But before we consign ourselves to despair, maybe we should just go back and say, "Did we get this right? Is this really how people are? Is this really how economies behave?" And almost straightaway we actually run up against a couple of anomalies. The first one is in the crisis itself. In the crisis, in the recession, what do people want to do? They want to hunker down. They want to look to the future. They want to spend less and save more. But saving is exactly the wrong thing to do from the system point of view. Keynes called this the "paradox of thrift" -- saving slows down recovery. And politicians call on us continually to draw down more debt, to draw down our own savings even farther, just so that we can get the show back on the road, so we can keep this growth-based economy going. It's an anomaly, it's a place where the system actually is at odds with who we are as people.

Here's another one -- completely different one: Why is it that we don't do the blindingly obvious things we should do to combat climate change, very, very simple things like buying energy-efficient appliances, putting in efficient lights, turning the lights off occasionally, insulating our homes? These things save carbon, they save energy, they save us money. So is it that, though they make perfect economic sense, we don't do them? Well, I had my own personal insight into this a few years ago. It was a Sunday evening, Sunday afternoon, and it was just after -- actually, to be honest, too long after -- we had moved into a new house. And I had finally got around to doing some draft stripping, installing insulation around the windows and doors to keep out the drafts. And my, then, five year-old daughter was helping me in the way that five year-olds do. And we'd been doing this for a while, when she turned to me very solemnly and said, "Will this really keep out the giraffes?" "Here they are, the giraffes." You can hear the five-year-old mind working. These ones, interestingly, are 400 miles north of here outside Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. Goodness knows what they make of the Lake District weather. But actually that childish misrepresentation stuck with me, because it suddenly became clear to me why we don't do the blindingly obvious things. We're too busy keeping out the giraffes -- putting the kids on the bus in the morning, getting ourselves to work on time, surviving email overload and shop floor politics, foraging for groceries, throwing together meals, escaping for a couple of precious hours in the evening into prime-time TV or TED online, getting from one end of the day to the other, keeping out the giraffes.

What is the objective? "What is the objective of the consumer?" Mary Douglas asked in an essay on poverty written 35 years ago. "It is," she said, "to help create the social world and find a credible place in it." That is a deeply humanizing vision of our lives, and it's a completely different vision than the one that lies at the heart of this economic model. So who are we? Who are these people? Are we these novelty-seeking, hedonistic, selfish individuals? Or might we actually occasi

I am afraid that I am even less convinced than before- the whole thing just strikes me as completely absurd. First, Biological Mimicry is, as I understand it, applying the processes of nature to our own lives, which runs into these two problems: first, Nature is imperfect, she runs, she creates, and she also devestate herself, her processes involves many things inapplicable to the human economy or human life in general, and, while we should study her, preserve her, and all that, there is absolutely no reason why we should live completely by her governance. We can't, for example apply Darwin's Theory of Evolution upon society- unless, of course, you are among those rare breed of Eugenicists. Second, we have an imperfect understanding of how she works, and any application of what is good in nature without a full understanding is like applying a superficial aspect of a happy, well-mannered, and genteel family to your own family- say the children's obedience to their parents- without fully understanding the cause of this goodness- to continue with the metaphor, what the authorities, in the form of the parents, do to merit this filiality, why the children should, for an instance, bend their own will to comply with the authority's request, so on and so forth, what incentives motivate them- pure tomfoolery.

Secondly, you seem to ignore material wants that does not fall between needs and image- to give an example, say I wanted to purchase something that is rather embarrassing and not only does not contribute to image and a sense of position in society, but can be detrimental to it, say pornography. I purchase this book with the utmost secrecy and stash it away where no one but myself have access to it, not because I need it, or I want it to belong to a social group, but because I desire it for its own sake. While there are some gross example of wants that are actively generated by marketing and advertisement, such as the Apple i-whatever-the-hell-they-are-wrapping-up-in-white-plastic-and-selling-for-half-your-annual-income and the Apple Community, some things are motivated by the desire of that object for itself. The economy runs on purchase, regardless of what type of wants goes into purchasing an item. You system of economics cannot surmount this, even if people do create schools to brain-wash...wait...educate children, and turn them to proper, altruistic gentlemen.

"Survival of the fittest" wasn't even Darwin's own word, nor is evolution the totality of nature or biology. Furthermore, "fittest" imply the species' capacity to change, in order to adapt its environment. Therefore nature is "imperfect" because environment is constantly changing, whereas a state of perfection is no change. So don't go about misinterpreting nature through superiority/god complex, when that's just sheer ignorance caused by unjustified arrogance.

Now, if you don't trust someone, you place restrictions on them, right. If I doubt my older sister's ability to pay back the 10 percent interest I established on her last loan, I'm going to withhold her ability to get more money from me until she pays it back. True story, by the way. Now, adults seem to have a prevalently restrictive attitude towards kids from every "don't do that," "don't do this" in the school handbook, to restrictions on school internet use. As history points out, regimes become oppressive when they're fearful about keeping control. And, although adults may not be quite at the level of totalitarian regimes, kids have no, or very little, say in making the rules, when really the attitude should be reciprocal, meaning that the adult population should learn and take into account the wishes of the younger population.

Now, what's even worse than restriction is that adults often underestimate kids abilities. We love challenges, but when expectations are low, trust me, we will sink to them. My own parents had anything but low expectations for me and my sister. Okay, so they didn't tell us to become doctors or lawyers or anything like that, but my dad did read to us about Aristotle and pioneer germ fighters when lots of other kids were hearing "The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round." Well, we heard that one too, but "Pioneer Germ Fighters" totally rules.(citation)

Your second point is even more extreme and biased, when in a sexually liberated society, human sexuality is just a part of nature, not a commodity. Furthermore, your sexual preference was not your choice, but rather it's a part of your biological drive. Your culture predetermined your custom of sexual regulation, because your society demands your energy towards solely on production and consumption. AKA sex sells.

Now, to say this, is not to say that we have got the perfect solution in our own society. For instance, this is what it's like to go to a news stand almost anywhere in the civilized world. Now, granted, for many men, it may require a degree in philosophy to see something wrong with these images. But if we are in a reflective mood we can ask, "Is this the perfect expression of psychological balance with respect to variables like youth and beauty and women's bodies?" I mean, is this the optimal environment in which to raise our children? Probably not. Okay, so perhaps there is some place on the spectrum between these two extremes that represents a place of better balance. Perhaps there are many such places --

again, given other changes in human culture there may be many peaks on the moral landscape. But the thing to notice is that there will be many more ways not to be on a peak. Now, the irony, from my perspective is that the only people who seem to generally agree with me and who think that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions are religious demagogues of one form or another.(citation)

So your societal custom of buying pornography in secrecy, was just self-evidence of your natural fitness within a materialistic culture that perceives women as nothing more than mere sexual objects of desire. AKA the man box.

I grew up in New York City, between Harlem and the Bronx. Growing up as a boy, we were taught that men had to be tough, had to be strong, had to be courageous, dominating -- no pain, no emotions, with the exception of anger -- and definitely no fear -- that men are in charge, which means women are not; that men lead, and you should just follow and do what we say; that men are superior, women are inferior; that men are strong, women are weak; that women are of less value -- property of men -- and objects, particularly sexual objects. I've later come to know that to be the collective socialization of men, better known as the "man box." See this man box has in it all the ingredients of how we define what it means to be a man. Now I also want to say, without a doubt, there are some wonderful, wonderful, absolutely wonderful things about being a man. But at the same time, there's some stuff that's just straight up twisted. And we really need to begin to challenge, look at it and really get in the process of deconstructing, redefining, what we come to know as manhood.

... I come to also look at this as this fear that we have as men, this fear that just has us paralyzed, holding us hostage to this man box. I can remember speaking to a 12 year-old boy, a football player, and I asked him, I said, "How would you feel if, in front of all the players, your coach told you you were playing like a girl?" Now I expected him to say something like, I'd be sad, I'd be mad, I'd be angry, or something like that. No, the boy said to me -- the boy said to me, "It would destroy me." And I said to myself, "God, if it would destroy him to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?"

It took me back to a time when I was about 12 years old. I grew up in tenement buildings in the inner-city. At this time we're living in the Bronx. And in the building next to where I lived there was a guy named Johnny. He was about 16 years old, and we were all about 12 years old -- younger guys. And he was hanging out with all us younger guys. And this guy, he was up to a lot of no good. He was the kind of kid who parents would have to wonder, "What is this 16 year-old boy doing with these 12 year-old boys?" And he did spend a lot of time up to no good. He was a troubled kid. His mother had died from a heroin overdose. He was being raised by his grandmother. His father wasn't on the set. His grandmother had two jobs. He was home alone a lot. But I've got to tell you, we young guys, we looked up to this dude. He was cool. He was fine. That's what the sisters said, "He was fine." He was having sex. We all looked up to him.

So one day, I'm out in front of the house doing something -- just playing around, doing something -- I don't know what. He looks out his window, he calls me upstairs, he said, "Hey Anthony." They called my Anthony growing up as a kid. "Hey Anthony, come on upstairs." Johnny call, you go. So I run right upstairs. As he opens the door, he says to me, "Do you want some?" Now I immediately knew what he meant. Because for me growing up at that time, and our relationship with this man box, do you want some meant one of two things, sex or drugs -- and we weren't doing drugs. Now my box, card, man box card, was immediately in jeopardy. Two things: One, I never had sex. We don't talk about that as men. You only tell your dearest, closest friend, sworn to secrecy for life, the first time you had sex. For everybody else, we go around like we've been having sex since we were two. There ain't no first time. The other thing I couldn't tell him is that I didn't want any. That's even worse. We're supposed to always be on the prowl. Women are objects, especially sexual objects.

Anyway, so I couldn't tell him any of that. So, like my mother would say, make a long story short. I just simply said to Johnny, "Yes." He told me to go in his room. I go in his room. On his bed is a girl from the neighborhood named Sheila. She's 16 years old. She's nude. She's what I know today to be mentally ill, higher functioning at times than others. We had a whole choice's-worth of inappropriate names for her. Anyway, Johnny had just gotten through having sex with her. Well actually, he raped her, but he would say he had sex with her. Because, while Sheila never said no, she also never said yes.

So he was offering me the opportunity to do the same. So when I go in the room, I close the door. Folks, I'm petrified. I stand with my back to the door so Johnny can't bust in the room and see that I'm not doing anything. And I stand there long enough that I could have actually done something. So now I'm no longer trying to figure out what I'm going to do, I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get out of this room. So in my 12 years of wisdom, I zip my pants down, I walk out into the room. And lo and behold to me, while I was in the room with Sheila, Johnny was back at the window calling guys up. So now there's a living room full of guys. It was like the waiting room in the doctor's office. And they asked me how was it. And I say to them, "It was good." And I zip my pants up in front of them, and I head for the door.

Now I say this all with remorse, and I was feeling a tremendous amount of remorse at that time, but I was conflicted, because, while I was feeling remorse, I was excited, because I didn't get caught, but I knew I felt bad about what was happening. This fear getting outside the man box totally enveloped me. It was way more important to me, about me and my man box card than about Sheila and what was happening to her.

See collectively, we as men are taught to have less value in women, to view them as property and the objects of men. We see that as an equation that equals violence against women. We as men, good men, the large majority of men, we operate on the foundation of this whole collective socialization. We kind of see ourselves separate, but we're very much a part of it. You see, we have to come to understand that less value, property and objectification is the foundation and the violence can't happen without it. So we're very much a part of the solution as well as the problem. The center for disease control says that men's violence against women is at epidemic proportions, is the number one health concern for women in this country and abroad.

So quickly, I'd like to just say, this is the love of my life, my daughter Jay. The world I envision for her, how do I want men to be acting and behaving? I need you on board. I need you with me. I need you working with me and me working with you on how we raise our sons and teach them to be men -- that it's okay to not be dominating, that it's okay to have feelings and emotions, that it's okay to promote equality, that it's okay to have women who are just friends and that's it, that it's okay to be whole, that my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman.

I remember asking a nine year-old boy. I asked a nine year-old boy, "What would life be like for you, if you didn't have to adhere to this man box?" He said to me, "I would be free."(citation)

I would say it is more arrogant to assume we know all about nature, when Science is but an imperfect emperical observation of nature and her many fold law, and know it so thoroughly as to apply it to ourselves-it assumes that we both are at the pinnicle of science, complete with perfect understanding, and thus able to apply its principles to our benefit, and, secondly, as a corollary to the first, arrogantly assume there is no more to be got out of science. There is nothing we can say with certainty, even with our sciences, only what is, through the powers of our current civilisation, only what is most accurate. It is less arrogant, or God-like, to say that nature is, herself, not perfect, because nature doesn't have a concept of what works and what doesn't, doesn't deliberate, does not choose to create anything, doesn't have any sense of perfection or imperfection, but is completely insentient, and only exist. As such, she can rends herself work woe upon her creatures by exactly the same processes that she creates, benefits, and do good onto the same. She isn't and shouldn't be a model for humanity, and it is insolent and stupid to assume that what we do not truly understand, and what doesn't exist for the benefit of anybody, can be used and imitated for our own purposes- the metaphor still holds.

Then, there is also another arrogance in saying you know what motivates all when you base that upon the experiences of a limited group of people. Your person, for example, who refuse the loan to her kin, bases her assesment of parental attitude as wrong because she was raised differently, and so, expects all to be raised like her and turn out to be like her. Humans, she must think, are monolithic, and can be raised in only one way and one way only, the way she was raised and the way she recommends. Children are all individual, and should be raised according to what they require as an individual- this, of course, begs the question, who should decide how children are raised? I certainly have no answer to that, but I am not presumptuous enough to say there is a universal method of raising children, or that there is a great deal of benefit in brainwashing them as you suggests with your model schools.

Afterwards, you try to pin down my desire of pornographic materials to mere biological determinism, built upon and driven forward by my society's stress on purchase and production, on pelf and pace, and all that. Now, let us pretend that it isn't porn I'm after, but books, and that these books are for my own private consumption, and not to create an air of an intellectual, but because I desire that book for its own sake, there being biologically and socially determination to like that particular book. That would still throw your theory off kilter- because I don't need the book, and the wanting of the book is not created by a cabal of marketers and advertisers, but because I want the book for its own sake, like I want the pornographic magazine for its own sake. I am not biologically inclined towards buying books or pornography- though my nature does determine my taste in pornography- and there is no sinister cabal of monacled men determining my taste- though the argument can be made for pornography, it does not explain away taste in literature.

Finally, you try to shoe me into your neat little theory of the 'man-box', what we normally call 'chauvinism', or, if you want to add a little Iberian flavour to it, 'machismo', and assumes two things, unrelated to Lord Jacques Fresco and his mighty magical system. First, that I am a heterosexual- which you do not know, nor will I tell you- and, next, that I view woman as something with which to quell my lust and nothing more, degrading woman to tools. And all this comes with being raised a man, as fashioned by Society's hand, consciously and unconsciously adapting what society describes as manly. Does society create an image of what is manly? Of course, you need not look too deep into that rubbish heap we call 'television programmes' to see it. Does it create expection that men feel required to meet, such as being well endowed with large genitals, foolhardy and thoughtless bravado, needless courage, emphasis of physical strenght over the intellect, what to wear, how to behave, all that? I would say it does as well. Am I part of this, I wouldn't know. All I know is, if I purchase pornography, it is not from my desire of belongingness or my need, but because I want, even if this want is created by society and biology.

Don't contradict the scientific rigor and its methods, when you just contradicted your own disposition due to your own assumption and superstition

Now I'm not telling you this story because I think Archie Cochrane is a dude, although Archie Cochrane is a dude. I'm not even telling you the story because I think we should be running more carefully controlled randomized trials in all aspects of public policy, although I think that would also be completely awesome. I'm telling you this story because Archie Cochrane, all his life, fought against a terrible affliction. And he realized it was debilitating to individuals and it was corrosive to societies. And he had a name for it. He called it the God complex. Now I can describe the symptoms of the God complex very, very easily. So the symptoms of the complex are, no matter how complicated the problem, you have an absolutely overwhelming belief that you are infallibly right in your solution.(citation)

Scientific Rigor

Modern science achieves its rigor through a set of approaches that ensures its progress and accuracy. First, the objects of science must be empirical; they must occur in the observable world. Second, the claims of any given study must be verifiable and repeatable. Third, the findings of any given study must not be stated as proofs of something about the world, but rather as models of trends in the world that can potentially be falsified. While its data and methods are different in nature, qualitative research is still concerned with discerning things about the observable world, and therefore does require scientific rigor; a social scientist must attempt to convey her findings so that others can uncover similar concepts or trends in the same--or a completely different--cultural context. Furthermore, the social scientist must be highly sensitive to her own subjectivity when conveying her findings.(citation)

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Just where have you observed that a scientific hypothesis still persist itself, despise that it isn't "verifiable and repeatable"? All I'm seeing is you intentionally and desperately defending something that you can't even define "accurately" with "progression": humanity as empathy. That's a logical fallacy obscurum per obscurius.

Next comes your obscure concept of individuality, when you can't even define the western indoctrination of individualism without yourself justify selfishness and apathy. While certain aboriginal culture has enough communal diversity to allow, celebrate, and accept the discovery of alternative gender identity. How arrogant of you to overgeneralize individuality, without yourself to observe the extreme opposite of belongingness: extreme isolation.

Thirdly, how would you even know what a book is in the first place? Before you could even decide for yourself that "I want the book for its own sake", you were socialized by your immediate social group about what a book is.

Finally, your biology suggests sex, not pornography. Your society OTOH just persuades you that its the next best thing through its materialistic and consumerist cultural values. And the resource based economy is just a change in cultural values that's modeled on humanity as empathy.

Don't contradict the scientific rigor and its methods, when you just contradicted your own disposition due to your own assumption and superstition

Now I'm not telling you this story because I think Archie Cochrane is a dude, although Archie Cochrane is a dude. I'm not even telling you the story because I think we should be running more carefully controlled randomized trials in all aspects of public policy, although I think that would also be completely awesome. I'm telling you this story because Archie Cochrane, all his life, fought against a terrible affliction. And he realized it was debilitating to individuals and it was corrosive to societies. And he had a name for it. He called it the God complex. Now I can describe the symptoms of the God complex very, very easily. So the symptoms of the complex are, no matter how complicated the problem, you have an absolutely overwhelming belief that you are infallibly right in your solution.(citation)

Scientific Rigor

Modern science achieves its rigor through a set of approaches that ensures its progress and accuracy. First, the objects of science must be empirical; they must occur in the observable world. Second, the claims of any given study must be verifiable and repeatable. Third, the findings of any given study must not be stated as proofs of something about the world, but rather as models of trends in the world that can potentially be falsified. While its data and methods are different in nature, qualitative research is still concerned with discerning things about the observable world, and therefore does require scientific rigor; a social scientist must attempt to convey her findings so that others can uncover similar concepts or trends in the same--or a completely different--cultural context. Furthermore, the social scientist must be highly sensitive to her own subjectivity when conveying her findings.(citation)

.
Just where have you observed that a scientific hypothesis still persist itself, despise that it isn't "verifiable and repeatable"? All I'm seeing is you intentionally and desperately defending something that you can't even define "accurately" with "progression": humanity as empathy. That's a logical fallacy obscurum per obscurius.

Next comes your obscure concept of individuality, when you can't even define the western indoctrination of individualism without yourself justify selfishness and apathy. While certain aboriginal culture has enough communal diversity to allow, celebrate, and accept the discovery of alternative gender identity. How arrogant of you to overgeneralize individuality, without yourself to observe the extreme opposite of belongingness: extreme isolation.

Thirdly, how would you even know what a book is in the first place? Before you could even decide for yourself that "I want the book for its own sake", you were socialized by your immediate social group about what a book is.

Finally, your biology suggests sex, not pornography. Your society OTOH just persuades you that its the next best thing through its materialistic and consumerist cultural values. And the resource based economy is just a change in cultural values that's modeled on humanity as empathy.

I do not doubt the scientific rigour, I am only stating what is fact- Science, as far as we can tell, is not a complete picture of what is and what isn't, and any of its current tenants, when faced with something with stronger evidence, will have to be discarded in favour of that. Therefore, it isn't perfect, and we do not know completely what is true and what isn't, only what is most accurate at the moment. Given its fallibility, it allows room for more study. But, to say we are able to copy from nature in miniature, and apply it to man is to say we have completed all science, and, by the by, have all understanding of nature, which is completely idiotic. We don’t have a complete understanding of nature, so we can’t copy it, and hope it works. We can’t copy a house in miniature if you only see part of the building outside, and a few beams inside- our view of the house is too incomplete.

Of course, then you say I have a God complex- I do not pretend to be an expert in any field, nor do I pretend, as you do, that my individual experience and experience of other are representative of all mankind, and children should be moulded in so and so way. If that lady-who-is-too-tight-fisted-to-lend-her-own-kin’s father’s method works for her, God be with him and let him go about his way with no interference from me, but, to say all are so and so is absolute tomfoolery based upon the idea that ‘because I am so, all are so’. You seem to suggest the same. But beside that, you seem keen on attacking the very idea of individualism, which is, as I understand it, and I do admit to having a very incomplete understanding of all things philosophical, the idea that everyone is an individual person, complete with a unique set of thought, unique processes, unique association of ideas, forged by unique experience, with individual needs and wants, in short, a unique creation that is able to reason and mete out judgement by itself. Each creature is endowed with this, otherwise, argument would not exist, and we would be no better than extensions of one another, in complete agreement at all time. This definition does not conflict with Moral Objectivism in that Moral Objectivist hold that there is a universal set of ethics, like the law of gravity, which governs us all, while we still exist as individuals within this universal set of ethics, just as monkeys and giant pandas are still bound by the same law of gravity while being different species. We need not be selfish, greedy, apathetic, and overall horrid people to be individuals as you seem to suggest.

Then you confuse the actual item of a book with its content- no one desire a book because it is a mass of paper collected and collated in thus way, we buy books because of what is in it- and no one decide our taste in the content. We may find a book we like isolated from any societal influence. Thus, we desire the book for its own sake, not because we are in some social group telling us that books are good and we should go buy ‘em. That is an example of material desire that is not a product of society’s want or biological need. I see something new that I would like to eat while passing a pastry shop- I suppose you shall tell me that I desire that because I am part of a social group that instilled this desire in me by some witchery or some magick. Or should I desire to taste some fruit I have never seen or heard of before, and I happen to pass it by whilst in a supermarket, maybe that can be chalk up to societal or biological determinism as well. As I see it, your system seems to want to surmount this form of desire by denying it exist altogether, then brainwash the children to get rid of such fancies he may have.